My time is not very valuable. I spend multiple hours a day watching TV and staring at my fantasy football team, hoping that somehow the combined force of all of the minutes I stare at players’ names will somehow compel them to get better. I feel the need to establish that because I’m genuinely angry with everyone involved with the movie adaptation of David Mitchell’s book, “Cloud Atlas,” for wasting two hours and 45 minutes of my life that I could have been staring at a different screen. And my screen wouldn’t charge me $5.00 for a soda.
I should mention that “Cloud Atlas” isn’t a terrible movie. The Wachowski siblings (Lana and Andy) along with the third co-director Tom Tykwer actually made what would have been a reasonably good movie if it weren’t so painfully long. The story itself is very riveting with basically five different mini-movies: a young man sailing back home to San Francisco, a new composer being mentored by an old great, a publisher’s struggle with life, a woman’s fight against slavery in the future and a goat herder’s journey in the apocalyptic aftereffect of the revolution. These stories somehow connect to each other, yet the overall effect of the movie is a relatively boring one.
The overall production value of the movie was great, which is to be expected of any movie that spends an estimated $100 million dollars among three directors and production costs, according to IMDb. “Cloud Atlas” has some great special effects throughout the futuristic scenes and has wonderfully grandiose, historic shots in the older scenes, which help make the movie very beautiful. On top of all that, the soundtrack to the movie is great, especially during the composer’s storyline, further enhancing the “prettiness” of the film.
Tom Hanks delivers a great performance in the several roles he plays throughout the film. The recurrence of actors seems like it would either be annoying or confusing, and at times it did feel a little forced (Hugh Grant in a fat suit and some painfully obvious make-up to make him look to be about 80), but overall it wasn’t hard to keep track of who was connected to whom. Hugo Weaving (“V for Vendetta”, The Matrix Trilogy) is his usual long-winded and dramatic self, and Halle Berry delivers a sold performance alongside Tom Hanks. But previously unheard-of Ben Whishaw (appearing in “Skyfall” as Q in November) really steals the screen during the storyline where he stars as Robert Frobisher and portrays the character incredibly well.
The biggest problem with “Cloud Atlas” is the length of the film itself. By the end, I simply didn’t care about what happened to anyone. Two hours and 45 minutes is a long time to spend with these characters, and I feel terrible for saying it, but they just become stale after a while. Some of the story lines, like the composer’s, held my attention most of the way through, yet the publisher’s story quickly turned into one I couldn’t feel any less about. It was an average movie overall, but it’s hard to justify setting aside nearly three hours for an average movie.
And I know I can’t really gripe about much of the story since the writers were adapting a book, but having not read the book, I was left feeling like I missed some important, overarching theme. The interconnectivity of the characters and story lines is neat, but that was seemingly all it was: neat. I was expecting to see a series of actions and repercussions, but it felt much more like watching origin stories. There was no real sense that something might be affected later in the future based on the actions taken during whichever storyline you were in, which, again, unless I missed something, seemed to be the point of the movie.
Overall, “Cloud Atlas” deserves a solid 3.5 clouds out of 5, if it weren’t nearly three hours long. As it is, it is simply a gorgeous movie with a few compelling points and a vague overarching theme that seems half-baked. Lovers of the book will probably love the movie, and I’m going to chalk that one up to them understanding something that I didn’t get from the film. So, despite being quality enough for a 3.5, “Cloud Atlas” receives 2.5 clouds for being annoyingly long.
