Cloud Atlas by Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, 2012 (R)

with Tom Hanks (Larry Crowne), Halle Berry (The Call), Jim Broadbent (Another Year, The Iron Lady), Hugo Weaving (Captain America, The Matrix), Jim Sturgess (One Day, Upside Down), Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Keith David (The Princess and The Frog), James D'Arcy, Xun Zhou, David Gyasi, Susan Sarandon (Solitary Man, Jeff Who Lives At Home, You don't know Jack), Hugh Grant (Did You Hear About The Morgans?, Two Weeks Notice)
From the directors of Bound, The Matrix and Run Lola Run

In this star-studded drama, six seemingly disparate stories take viewers from a South Pacific Island in the 19th century to 1970s America to a dystopian future, exploring the complicated links that humans share through the generations.

It is a strange movie this one... It has a very dense plot, complex editing, parallelism between the characters, and actors who are playing different roles, at the beginning it is almost a game of who is playing who... But after a while, you start knowing the characters, just enough to start the story, and at the point where their adventure barely starts, the plot starts failing, with a very distinctive style for each period, you could think it is a great exercise of style, but at the end, everything is so disparate it doesn't blend. And it is very moralistic, imagine being once moralistic... now multiply it by six different stories, that makes six identical moral, in the end it is slightly redundant! So I have to say, the seventies blacksploitation part is actually really cool, the slow unraveling of the love letters story of the 30s beautifully musical and poetic, the future is interestingly conceptualized with rules and the backward result that follows it, but somehow, the character of the present completely clashes with his goofy sense of humor. Of course, the actors probably had a blast creating with their costume new characters, but still, it becomes exhausting. My only surprise is that the next day, I felt nostalgic already of this movie, there is something that carries the movie merging period piece with science fiction, and the connectedness from the characters is attaching. So despite the fact that I didn't particularly love the movie, I really liked the ideas of it.

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