“Cloud Atlas” Shows the Boundlessness of Life

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

That moment when you know you’ve been here before, when you recognize a complete stranger, when a song overwhelms you with undeniable familiarity. Is it reincarnation, déjà vu, or is all of time concurrent? “Cloud Atlas” poses these questions of eternal existence and the rippling effects of our every decision by following 10 peoples’ past and future lives in different worlds and eras.
The genre-fusing, time-warping “Cloud Atlas,” based on David Mitchell’s novel of the same name and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, jumps from a 1850s voyage to a dystopian futuristic Korea and beyond. In each era we follow a different character’s story through letters, a diary, a manuscript, a film, and a recorded message.

We first meet Jim Sturgess as a notary travelling across the Pacific in 1849, then later as a Korean rebel in futuristic Neo Seoul. Tom Hanks is introduced as a tattooed islander, then a 19th century medicine man, then a British gangster. Halle Berry appears as a slave, a 1970s journalist, a high-society white woman, and an Atlantis-esque traveler in a future world. We also get to know past and future versions, in both large and small roles, of Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Ben Whishaw, Doona Bea, Keith David, James D’Arcy, and Susan Sarandon. Some actors even appear more times than we may notice, as their extravagant makeup and shocking physical alterations make them almost completely unrecognizable.

But while the actors’ physicality set each of their characters apart, their incarnations are all morally and personally similar: the valiant hero always a hero, the ruthless villain always the villain. The thread that flows through each story of “Cloud Atlas,” connects each character to another, allowing them to completing what was left unfinished in their previous or future lives.

Yet the film is not presented in sequential order, instead skipping and weaving between one story and the next and back again. At one point the story jumps back and forth between the goofy, comedic escape of four elderly Brits from a retirement home, to a “Three Days of the Condor”-like shootout, to a futuristic chase reminiscent of “The Matrix.” Instead of showing what was or what will be, this continual intercutting of past and future seems to suggest the concurrent existence of all time. Through memories, dreams, discovered writings, and music, “Cloud Atlas” shows how we are all connected in some way or another.

This onscreen déjà vu occurs off-screen as well, as the audience jumps from one time to the next, unsure of who is who, but catching hints to parallels throughout. Just as Halle Berry’s 1975 Louisa Rey character recognizes a musical composition from a past life, yet unable recall why, the audience too wanders through the first half of the film lost, but discovering traces of connections as we go.

With three directors, two separate crews, over 50 characters, and more than six stories, “Cloud Atlas” is undoubtedly a confounding film. Yet it somehow miraculously blends the themes and styles of each director with those of the various stories. The concepts that align Sturgess’ past and future characters are the same as those in the Wachowski’s “V For Vendetta”: subversion and revolution. As each character’s choices affect their future and past selves and the people they encounter, the notion of every action’s impact on the next from Tom Tykwer’s

“Run Lola Run” is evoked.

Through threading together the film’s various genres and fusing each characters past and future selves, “Cloud Atlas” reveals the boundlessness of life. Some may call déjà vu a glitch in the Matrix, but maybe it tells us more about who we are and the significance of every choice.

A version of this article appeared in the October 22, 2012 print edition of the Washington Square News.