“Oh, he always plays the bad guy. Just watch.” I heard that all the time when I was growing up. My mom was quite the connoisseur of movie pigeonholes. She’d have been gobsmacked by Cloud Atlas, a film that takes actors and has them portray characters good, evil and all shades in-between. This is a film that is described as a “sweeping epic”, and rightly so. But it also manages to take time to let the viewers really get to know the characters and care what happens next. I did something I haven’t done in awhile when I watched Cloud Atlas: I never once took my eyes off the screen. That played hell with my scrounging in my purse for that last bit of chocolate I’d dropped, but for this film sacrifices had to be made.
How to describe Cloud Atlas without taking pages of narrative to do so? Aye, that’s the rub. Well, it tells several stories from the viewpoints of even more characters. These stories happen at various points in the history of our world. As the movie progresses, these stories become tangled up in one another, and you see that one simple act can really change fate. I usually don’t share my screening notes in reviews, as most people don’t dig gibberish, but interspersed among the bits of story I jotted down were the words fascinating, powerful and epic. And I don’t jot that kinda stuff down very often. This is the first time I’ve ever used ‘em all to describe one film.
