I don’t throw around the word remarkable very much. But here it is; Cloud Atlas is a remarkable film.
If you watch an ad for it, you’ll have literally no idea what it’s actually about. Let me see if I can do better:
There are 6 distinct stories told with different styles and set in different times.
The first is an adventure told in the form of journal entries. During the California gold rush, an American notary falls ill in the Pacific islands and befriends a skilled doctor and a Moriori tribesman. One of the two men he befriends seeks to kill him.
The second is a collection of letters a composer sends to his former lover from Cambridge starting in 1931. The 2 men have parted ways since school as the other is a physicist. The Composer is helping an elderly “great” composer with his work while amused by the naivety of an American in a seafaring story he is reading. He is also writing his own composition which involves 6 distinct solos overlapping each other. However the old composer has ideas of his own.
The third is set in 1975 and begins when a young journalist is caught in an elevator with an elderly physicist. The old man hints he may have a story for her but is murdered shortly after their conversation. The journalist finds a set of letters from the 1930’s among his effects.
The fourth is set in 2012, as Timothy Cavendish, a publisher, flees the henchmen of a criminal who has penned a tell-all book, he picks up a story about a reporter investigating a nuclear plant in the 70’s.
The fifth is set very far in the future in Neo Seoul, which looks to be a floating city on an ocean that was once Asia. A slave clone called Sonmi-451, who works/lives/sleeps at a fast food restaurant, accidentally sees part of an old video called “The Terrible Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish”. After which she cannot sleep…
And the sixth is set even further in the future in a post-apocalyptic world where the year is “104 winters after the fall”. A tribe, who worships a peaceful goddess named Sonmi, lives and farms on the island of Hawaii while trying to avoid raiders from the other islands. One day a woman arrives in a mechanical ship asking for a guide to the top of the mountain…
But all these stories are the same story. The characters, with one exception, are reincarnations of previous characters. The mantle of office (a person who is reincarnated isn’t the same person as previous incarnations, duh, good and evil [or in this case humanity and authority, which aren’t as easily pigeon holed] are choices which must be made and remade constantly) is a birthmark. And what may seem evil in one age may echo through time and save humanity in the future. It is simply impossible to tell until the race has been run.
This is a beautiful, haunting, and remarkable film.