A five star Happy Meal
So, can we talk about how great 'Cloud Atlas' is? A few spoilers under the cut.
It's basically made up of six interweaving stories, featuring the same actors over and over again to convey the message that we all meet again in different lifetimes. Some of the stories were in the past, one in the present, two in the future. I (typically) liked the ones in the past best - one was centred around a man on a slave ship, one was about a musician's apprentice in about the 1930s, one focused on a journalist in the 1970s. They were all brilliant, and I think I would actually have gone to see each of them separately if they'd had their own films. If I had to pick a favourite, I'd probably pick the musician one - maybe because of Ben Whishaw (oh Ben Whishaw, I can understand why Simon Amstell totally loves you), who was excellent, and Jim Broadbent, also excellent, but maybe also because it was a bit romantic and it was set in Edinburgh and it was just heartbreaking. The segment set in the present was easily the funniest, although it had it's dark overtones as well. As for the two in the future...one was set in 2144, and seemed almost like a Charlie Brooker-esque vision of a dystopian future, and the other was set on a different planet but clearly far ahead in the future, although the characters in it lived a sort of primitive life - I found it more interesting than enjoyable.
In short, it was just nice to see a film that made me think a little bit (I saw 'The Guilt Trip' the night before and was nearly bored to tears - if you haven't heard of it, Seth Rogen plays Barbara Streisand's son and they drive across America together, The End), and feel a bit. I love the way all the actors were reused in every segment to add to the sense of deja vu, and I actually only spotted about half of these repetitions. It must take some amount of effort to play as many characters as Tom Hanks did, for example. For a 15 rated film, I would say it was quite violent - lots of blood - but I really, really loved it. I am now definitely going to try and find the book (I read a David Mitchell (no, not that David Mitchell) book years ago, 'Black Swan Green', and I remember that I didn't like the ending and decided I would probably never read another DM book again, but looks like I'm going back on that now).
It's basically made up of six interweaving stories, featuring the same actors over and over again to convey the message that we all meet again in different lifetimes. Some of the stories were in the past, one in the present, two in the future. I (typically) liked the ones in the past best - one was centred around a man on a slave ship, one was about a musician's apprentice in about the 1930s, one focused on a journalist in the 1970s. They were all brilliant, and I think I would actually have gone to see each of them separately if they'd had their own films. If I had to pick a favourite, I'd probably pick the musician one - maybe because of Ben Whishaw (oh Ben Whishaw, I can understand why Simon Amstell totally loves you), who was excellent, and Jim Broadbent, also excellent, but maybe also because it was a bit romantic and it was set in Edinburgh and it was just heartbreaking. The segment set in the present was easily the funniest, although it had it's dark overtones as well. As for the two in the future...one was set in 2144, and seemed almost like a Charlie Brooker-esque vision of a dystopian future, and the other was set on a different planet but clearly far ahead in the future, although the characters in it lived a sort of primitive life - I found it more interesting than enjoyable.
In short, it was just nice to see a film that made me think a little bit (I saw 'The Guilt Trip' the night before and was nearly bored to tears - if you haven't heard of it, Seth Rogen plays Barbara Streisand's son and they drive across America together, The End), and feel a bit. I love the way all the actors were reused in every segment to add to the sense of deja vu, and I actually only spotted about half of these repetitions. It must take some amount of effort to play as many characters as Tom Hanks did, for example. For a 15 rated film, I would say it was quite violent - lots of blood - but I really, really loved it. I am now definitely going to try and find the book (I read a David Mitchell (no, not that David Mitchell) book years ago, 'Black Swan Green', and I remember that I didn't like the ending and decided I would probably never read another DM book again, but looks like I'm going back on that now).