Cloud Atlas (2012)

"To be is to be perceived. And so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our mortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds ..."

So says Tilda (Bae Doona), the pretty "fabricant" near the end of the 2012 film adaptation of David Mitchell's sprawling time-space novel Cloud Atlas (2004). Of course we know by then that Tilda is a deity in a future world that looks and sounds like third century Wales, but are her lines taken from Mitchell's book, or were they supplied by the filmmakers (the team that gave us the Matrix)? Or were they improvised, like Rutger Hauer improvised the "replicant" Roy Batty's dying lines in Blade Runner? As for the message in these lines, it too feels synthetic -- a blend of Andy Warhol (35%), Luce Irigaray (10%), the Thomas Theorem (40%) and relational social practice (15%). Not necessarily a bad thing -- if it didn't make us dependent on those othering forces that invariably enslave us. 

Cloud Atlas spans 497 years (1849-2346) and features actors in multiple roles, with Tom Hanks leading the way with five (six if you count an older version of one of his characters). At over two-and-a-half hours, the film amounts to three features and two shorts that cut in and out of each other both visually (a tracking shot of a speeding car in 1973 San Francisco cuts to a mid-19th century African slave racing across a ship's mast) and thematically (slaves on an English ship cut to fabricants serving bubble tea in a futuristic Seoul, Korea). Did I like it? Well, I didn't bail on it.

The film needs to be seen again in order to be fully appreciated. But there's a certain point (after the first hour?) where the filmmakers, content that they had laid the foundation for the film's characters and their stories, ratchet things up a notch. Whether this is to keep their Matrix audience interested is the likely reason. Whether that audience stuck around that long is another question. For this viewer, the hardest thing to sit through was not only its increasingly frenzied, dot-connecting pace but the makeup, which at times looks ghastly, as if the film had dialectically entered self-parody. And I'm not even talking about people of one racialized group playing those of another. Anytime I see actors in prothetic makeup I see them on the talk shows laughing about it.