By Chris Tookey
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CLOUD ATLAS (15)
Verdict: A super-colossal flop
Rating: Turkey
Six bad films for the price of one, this vanity mega-flop cost 65?million to make and heaven knows how much to publicise. It staggers on for almost three hours and calls into question the sanity of some of the world's best-known actors.
It has no fewer than three directors: Andy and Lana (formerly Larry) Wachowski, who made the Matrix trilogy, and Tom Tykwer, best known for chase film Run Lola Run.
It's a classic example of artistic over-ambition and star egotism crushing the life out of original material — David Mitchell's much-loved novel — that was bright, playful and entertaining. The film has none of those qualities: it's long-winded, pompous and full of risibly misjudged performances.
Clouded view: In the film, Hugh Grant plays a cannibalistic, face-painted warlord, manager of a futuristic diner and nuclear plant boss Lloyd Hooks - and that's just three of them
Take just a few of the casting decisions. Hugh Grant as a cannibalistic, face-painted warlord? Tom Hanks as a belligerent Celtic novelist? Jim Sturgess, the talented young star of One Day, as a Korean freedom fighter?
As those who have read the novel will know, Cloud Atlas tells six short stories, set over 500 years from 1849 to the distant future. Mitchell's artistry means that each tale is an exercise in literary pastiche.
For an adaptation to have worked cinematically, it would have required a director skilful enough to parody six very different cinematic genres.
These are: a shipboard costume drama with an earnest, libertarian message (think Spielberg's Amistad); Thirties British costume drama (like any of the E.?M. Forster novels brought to the screen); an Ealing comedy sensibility applied to a One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest scenario; Seventies conspiracy thriller (such as Chinatown); futuristic urban dystopia (Minority Report); and post-apocalyptic thriller (Logan's Run).
Tykwer does a moderately competent job on the segment set in the present day, where a cowardly British publisher (beautifully played by Jim Broadbent) is trapped inside a repressive nursing home (where his chief jailer is a Nurse Ratched figure played by Hugo Weaving in drag) and makes plans to escape. It's thinly plotted and far from plausible, but at least it's amusing.
Strange as they come: Tom Hanks as Zachry and Halle Berry as Meronym - two of the more normal looking roles they take on in Cloud Atlas
Tykwer is less comfortable in the Seventies segment, obviously modelled on the movie Silkwood, in which a whistle-blowing scientist (Tom Hanks) works with an investigative journalist (Halle Berry) to reveal nasty deeds in the energy industry, probably perpetrated by a smooth-talking, sexist boss played, like many of the bad guys in the movie, by Hugh Grant.
This section comes across not so much as energetic pastiche as a weary rip-off of much better films. Tykwer's other segment is his weakest, in which an ineffectual gay pianist (Ben Whishaw) goes to work for a tyrannical old composer (Broadbent, this time cast as the villain), who steals all his ideas. This is presented as a bid for artistic and personal freedom, in the slightly etiolated style of the Merchant-Ivory film Maurice.
The Wachowskis' three segments are the big-budget follies. They display no sense of humour and the same heavy-handedness that made the Matrix trilogy collapse into overblown excess and long-winded philosophising.
The least obnoxious is the 19th-century one, where a young Englishman (Sturgess) learns slavery is wrong while he's being poisoned for his gold by an unscrupulous doctor — Tom Hanks, this time trying to look and sound like Lee Marvin.
Then there's a sci-fi extravaganza, stylistically and thematically a mixture of Blade Runner and Soylent Green, in which a second-class citizen-slave (Doona Bae) falls in with Korean freedom-fighters led by Sturgess.
Despite ravishing visuals of a futuristic city, this degenerates into a wham-bam shoot-em-up all too reminiscent of the third Matrix film at its frozen-faced worst. Another, even more dystopic vision of the future shows a scientist (Berry) joining forces with a shaman (Hanks) to overcome marauding cannibals led by an unrecognisable Grant. This bit comes across as a talky, poor man's version of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. The directorial decision to intercut all six stories will confuse those who haven't read the book, and leaves the audience little opportunity to empathise with any of the characters. The book was constructed far more accessibly as a series of short stories.
Nice disguise: The elderly Asian (and bionic) Doctor Ovid is none other than Oscar winning actress Halle Berry
In the novel, the interconnections were allowed to emerge; in the film, they're ponderously explicit.
The device of using the same actor to appear in each of the stories has a limited success as a facile shorthand. If Weaving or Grant appears, he's a panto villain. If Berry appears as a major character, you know she's a seeker of truth. If Sturgess appears, he symbolises the spirit of rebellion.
The device collapses with the morally equivocal characters. Tom Hanks, who plays a range of heroes, villains and cameos with nothing in common, shows all too obviously that his range as an actor is far from limitless; in much of it, he seems to be showing off his non-existent mastery of accents. Someone seems to have told him he's the new Peter Sellers; he definitely isn't.
Almost as embarrassing, Susan Sarandon turns up in a variety of roles that scarcely register; her loopy omnipresence is merely distracting.
And some of the gimmicky, pointless miscasting of minor roles — the attempt to pass off Asian actress Doona Bae as a 19th-century Englishwoman, for example, or Halle Berry as a man or a white-skinned Jew — are laughably unconvincing.
A complex book is reduced to a banal statement that the purpose of life is to fight repression, and that we are all in some mysterious way reincarnated souls. Fortune cookies have more depth.
Cloud Atlas the movie is a pretentious shambles that generates zero emotional involvement with its feeble characters. It will die a horrible and well-deserved death at the box office.
Though it has many of the vices we associate with Hollywood — dumbing down, excessive scale, star egotism — it was put together with money from China, Korea, Singapore and Germany; an entertaining documentary might well be produced showing how on earth a film this bonkers ever got made.
You can be certain we will never see its like again. It's undoubtedly a turkey, but the truth is it's weirdly watchable.
At least it perishes of over-ambition by people who meant well but were woefully ill-equipped to bring it to fruition. It's cinematic death by misadventure.
Banjo Kazooie, well Tooie, represents. (except for Canary Mary)
- Say what , Senseville, Australia, 22/2/2013 06:52
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