Cloud Atlas

At the cli­max of Mon­ty Python’s The Mean­ing of Life, Michael Palin – play­ing a bored dowa­ger in a char­treuse ball­go­wn – is hand­ed a gold­en enve­lope con­tain­ing the answer to the ulti­mate question.

For the pre­vi­ous 90 min­utes, the Pythons have deliv­ered a series of uncon­nect­ed vignettes pre­sent­ing the sev­en ages of man as a taste­less cav­al­cade of fren­zy, humil­i­a­tion and deviance. Final­ly, Palin opens the let­ter. It reads, ​“Well, it’s noth­ing very spe­cial. Try and be nice to peo­ple, avoid eat­ing fat, read a good book now and then, and try and live in peace and har­mo­ny with peo­ple of all creeds and nations.”

And that, in a nut­shell, is Cloud Atlas, 172 long, long min­utes of mess­ing around in a dress­ing-up box, all capped off with a desul­to­ry exis­ten­tial bon mot that’s so lazy, weak and obvi­ous it could have eas­i­ly fall­en out of a defec­tive Christ­mas cracker.

Draw­ing from David Mitchell’s acclaimed and pur­port­ed­ly ​‘unfilmable’ 2004 sci-fi doorstop, direc­tors Andy and Lana Wachows­ki (with assists from Run Lola Run helmer Tom Tyk­w­er) present six dis­parate shag­gy-dog sto­ries that take place at var­i­ous points through­out his­to­ry, all fea­tur­ing com­bi­na­tions of their prin­ci­pal cast in daft hair pieces and dis­tract­ing prosthetics.

So we have buck­toothed medic Tom Han­ks up to chi­canery on a 19^th-cen­tu­ry schooner. Then there’s tat­tooed, cow­ard­ly future-man Tom Han­ks tool­ing around post-apoc­a­lypse Hawaii and talk­ing gib­ber­ish with Halle Berry. The direc­tors’ sole task is to con­vince us that these mal­formed lit­tle tales are inter­con­nect­ed by threads of eter­nal commonality.

The result is a baf­fling con­fec­tion that plays out like a gross par­o­dy of an august pres­tige pic­ture and one that sin­gu­lar­ly fails to bind its var­i­ous strands into any­thing even approach­ing a cohe­sive whole. Cut­ting back and forth between six obscure, aim­less sto­ries doesn’t make the over­all pro­ceed­ings any more point­ed or inter­est­ing. Mak­ing your film long does not make it epic.

Wil­ful­ly recy­cling your act­ing ensem­ble in order to ram home your mis­fir­ing dec­la­ra­tions about the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the human con­di­tion is not ambi­tious, but tir­ing and indul­gent. It cre­ates a dis­tanc­ing effect. And isn’t hav­ing most of the well-to-do West­ern heroes even­tu­al­ly res­cued or redeemed by a coterie of ​‘mag­i­cal eth­nics’ – a beatif­ic Kore­an sex-bot, a South African slave, an irate, bereaved Mex­i­can ​“wet­back”, some Scot­tish rug­by hooli­gans – rather under­min­ing the world-hug­ging premise?

Nev­er mind. As long as everyone’s in con­stant floods of tears and the sound­track swells in all the right places, per­haps no one will notice.

Visu­al­ly, there are pros and cons. Some fair­ly basic out­door scenes have clear­ly been shot in the stu­dio, giv­ing the film and occa­sion­al­ly staid, syn­thet­ic feel. Else­where, a high-styled sci-fi milieu trans­ports us to a futur­is­tic, Man­ga-inspired Neo Seoul where we are able to rev­el in some breath­tak­ing pro­duc­tion design.

Also, a thump­ing astro-bike chase sug­gests the Wachowskis took a few edit-room lessons away from the fail­ure of Speed Rac­er. Indeed, the edit­ing on the whole is effec­tive, with the rig­or­ous cross-cut­ting dur­ing first half of the film at least giv­ing the illu­sion that there’s an organ­ic rela­tion­ship between these dis­cor­dant tales. Even if, frankly, there real­ly isn’t.

An occa­sion­al reminder that we are all star­dust, that we’re all in this togeth­er and, hell, that we’re all Tom Han­ks is nev­er whol­ly unwel­come, but the faux-seraph­ic, overblown, self-con­grat­u­la­to­ry, log­i­cal­ly sketchy fog that engulfs Cloud Atlas drains that mes­sage of all its colour and shade. Life is sweet and Cloud Atlas – to quote God – is noth­ing very special.