A top-notch cast and compelling story made readers overlook their own confusion in Anarchos Pictures’ “Cloud Atlas.” Mandatory Credit: modernviewpoint.com

by Andrew Wasik ’13

After close to three hours sitting in a movie seat, I walked away from “Cloud Atlas,” based on the 2004 novel by David Mitchell, more confused than I have ever been before. The entire car ride home with my friend was spent in silence contemplating what we had just seen. But during that car ride I realized that I had the strange sense that I loved the movie. The plot, if you can call it that, consists of six loosely connected stories all told with the same basic group of actors who play different roles. The switches in narrative felt like they came every two minutes. A man on a long ocean voyage home to his wife, a composer separated from his same sex lover until he finishes his masterpiece, a journalist in the 1970’s uncovering a nuclear threat, an old man put in a prison-like nursing home, a clone in the future breaking free from her way of life, a post-apocalyptic native of Hawaii dealing with a strange visitor from what seems like the future.  One of the movie’s major motifs is reincarnation and karma, and the actors who play different roles in different stories are reincarnated versions of themselves. The stories are seemingly told by the characters in the next story. The composer is reading the journal of the man’s ocean voyage, and the journalist is reading the letters the composer sends to his lover. I consider myself a fairly smart guy; I can usually comprehend movies on the first viewing, even when they are super complicated. But about an hour in I realized that I had little comprehension what I was watching. I was completely lost until a scene where the clone has a moment of realization when she sees the world for the first time and says “Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” This was where I began to realize that the six stories are connected by this notion of an interconnected humanity. Don’t get me wrong, I still ended up leaving the theater confused. But I still walked out of there at least thinking that I had enjoyed that movie. It is a visually stunning movie and all the actors shine in their many roles. Jim Broadbent shines brightest overall in my favorite story where he plays an old man escaping from a nursing home, which had me laughing so hard I was close to tears. Upon further research on the internet I still understood very little about “Cloud Atlas,” but the movie did succeed in making me want to read the novel. This is the films rare gift. You’re left wanting to better understand it and you’ll be willing to put in the effort to do it.