Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas is based on David Mitchell's 2004 novel and must have been a huge challenge for the filmmakers to adapt. The book has six radically different stories from six different time periods but unlike the book, the film intertwines these. This I thought would make it impossible to follow, particularly for someone like me who prefers a linear plot, but no, it is done well and works brilliantly. I have little trouble keeping track of who's who, what's what, where’s when etc, as the film cuts seamlessly from one century to another, often cleverly dropping us in a similar situation when we arrive there. 

As for the plot, well there’s a lot of it and it would be bordering on the insane to attempt to summarise it but here goes...  

 

We start on board a ship in the 19^th century with a man called Adam Ewing and a runaway slave. Then we’re off to 1930’s Britain and a bisexual English composer called Frobisher who is reading Adam Ewing diary.

 

Then its 1970’s San Francisco where an investigative journalist called Luisa Rey meets Frobisher’s gay lover forty years on and also reads Frobisher’s letters to him.  

In present day Britain, a publisher called Cavendish receives a manuscript of a novel based on Rey's life while he is in hiding, against his will in a nursing home, from the associates of a gangster whose book he has published.

 

He is inspired to write a screenplay of his own story, the film of which is then watched by Sonmi, a genetically engineered fabricant in 2144 Seoul, while she is on the run. 

 

She is executed and becomes the goddess than the tribesmen worship years later, 106 winters after ‘The Fall’, where pretty much everything has fallen apart and humanity has ended up back where it started, living in mud huts and caves.

So its part science fiction, part historical drama, part romance, part comedy, part thriller and fully one big audacious idea.

There are many themes going on. Oppression, freedom, destiny, the gradual increasing dominance of the establishment over everything, the idea that our actions affect others throughout time and perhaps reincarnation. What fits in nicely with this reincarnation concept is the fact that all the principal actors play different characters in each story.

So Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Xun Zhou, Susan Sarandon, Keith David, James D'Arcy and Doona Bae appear many times. If you can spot them and often you can’t because they may have been aged, or had their race changed or even they may have changed their gender.

In the end credits, each actor's name appears with a clip of each of their roles. Everyone stopped to watch this, and some roles were so well disguised that there were gasps of amazement as the audience discovered who played whom.

Cloud Atlas will entertain you as much as it will infuriate you but that is no bad thing. Really though there's simply so much to debate about it, that you should just go see the film. Don't try to understand it, just enjoy it. I actually thought I was going to hate it going in but I was sorry when it finished.

You also would have thought this mad cap idea would have been a shoo-in for several Oscar nominations, Screenplay certainly, Editing, Makeup etc, if not for the acting roles which are good but not spectacular. Still, if Daniel Day Lewis can win for one good acting role, what award do you give the actors here, several of which put in six. Sadly, not a single nomination.

The Way Back

‘The Way Back’ is the story of a group of men who were imprisoned in one of Stalin’s Siberian gulags but escape and walk to safety. That’s just a mere four thousand miles over a couple of mountain ranges and across a desert.

It is based on the international bestseller, ‘The Long Walk’, which is in effect the memoirs of Slavomit Racuwicz, a Polish army officer, who himself was a prisoner in the gulag. Although since his death it has come to light that, and I’m trying not to say that he made it up but, it appears he didn’t make that journey himself and apparently based it on stories he had heard. However director Peter Weir claims to have done his research, so presumably he thinks such a journey would be possible. I’m not so sure but it makes for a captivating couple of hours cinema.

The film starts by introducing us to some of the characters inside the prison and the harsh reality of life there. The inmates are warned that the gulag itself is only part of their prison and should they feel the need to escape, nature will take its toll upon them. This prospect doesn't however put them off plotting an escape.

Key among the escapees is Janusz (Jim Sturgess), a pole who has been imprisoned for allegedly being a spy. The evidence paraded before him was his weeping wife, Janusz is convinced must have been tortured, who betrays him to his face.

The escape itself bursts out of almost nothing and the men break out into a blizzard. Among the motley band of escapees are the knife wielding psycho Valka (Colin Farrell) and a grizzled American who wishes to be referred to only as Mr Smith (Ed Harris).



The men head out across the hostile terrain, scavenging for food and water, towards Mongolia, only to discover when they get there that it too is under Soviet rule and they have to rethink their final destination.



Directorial licence also adds some female interest to an otherwise all male story. Not sure why Weir felt it needed it but I suppose Saoirse Ronan does break up the bickering between the escapees who have to make their uneasy alliance work just to survive.



A few do fall by the wayside and the ones that don’t endure a perilous journey to freedom, which continues out of Mongolia across the seemingly endless Gobi Desert where they struggle against the blazing heat and sand storms as well as a distinct lack of food and water.

They finally reach Tibet where they are faced with crossing the Himalayas in order to reach English run India. A final trek that is rushed compared with the rest of the film.



It’s a long film but thoroughly engrossing, one that has you captivated the entire time. A story of human endurance and the stark struggle for freedom. Though it’s a bit repetitive at times. You know: - mountain, desert, mountain, desert, etc but it’s all beautifully filmed and does drive home the vastness of their task but also the implausibility of it.

Then once he’s achieved his aim Janusz has to wait almost half a century for the fall of communism so that he can be reunited with his wife. Life’s a bitch.