When we’re young, we often have little idea why the adults around us behave the way they do: why they seem so tired all the time, why they fear the bills in the mail, why they sometimes seem defeated, remarking on dreams dashed and hopes unfulfilled. As we grow older, we come to understand, little by little, why so many are this way. We’re told that if we are born a man or woman, we need to dress this or that way and have feelings for the opposite sex; that if we have a certain skin color, we need to behave in accordance and associate with others with the same skin; that if we want to achieve happiness, we have to give up our autonomy, personality, and thoughts to submit to someone with money for the greater part of our lives. Personal expression is whittled away bit by bit until we are cogs in the machine, robots wearing fake smiles to convince customers we really care. Feelings of isolation set in, like the weight of the world is on our shoulders and no one else notices. It’s not as if anyone existing within this system actually thinks it works. In fact, the majority are far too beaten down to do anything about it. The rest feel that, though they dislike the system, other options are out of the question, either because they are unfamiliar or impossible to put into practice.
It’s hard to consider truths like these and not come away with a bleak view of the state of humanity. No matter what we do, nothing ever seems to change for the better. Slavery still exists at home and abroad, the environment is still on the downturn, and there’s myriad other forms of misery to wallow in that won’t be named here. But this defeatist line of thinking fails to improve anything, and it’s sadly widespread. Civilizations throughout history have collapsed because people failed to heed the warning signs or stand up for what they believed in. Apathy sets in as situations worsen, all when the simple choice to act would’ve changed everything. Of course, some have taken action, their victories paving the way for those that come after to go places they never dreamed. From the abolitionists of the 19th century, to the Civil Rights activists of the 1950s and ‘60s, to the Black Lives Matter of today, every few years this movement is revived once more. The new generation continues the work of the last and inspires others in the future to carry on the fight. History is not a linear progression towards something better, but good deeds ripple out and touch the lives of innumerable people.
Cloud Atlas, the 2012 time-crossing epic from the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, posits that all struggles humanity faces are actually one and the same. The film focuses on six different stories from six periods in humanity’s past and future, the oldest set in the plantation slavery era of 1849 and the farthest away in distant post-apocalyptic 2321. Each story recounts an act of rebellion by individuals against the powers-that-be, with every small triumph directly inspiring the protagonist in the next chapter to fight for something greater than themselves. Though it lacks the visceral panache of their 2008 anime-influenced, green screen-reliant magnum opus Speed Racer, or the noirish, sickly green computer-code cum kung fu movie look of The Matrix, Cloud Atlas remains a disorienting work. Their ensemble cast takes on numerous roles across space and time, and the stories are connected by the use of experimental, freeform cross-cutting techniques, making the film a bold cinematic experiment. It’s still a visually stimulating film, but unlike their previous work, which relied more on controlled digital settings, Cloud Atlas is beautifully imprecise on nearly every level.
Actors reappear in different roles in every story, often playing the next step of their previous character’s soul as it is reborn time and time again. Some souls degenerate into evil, while others grow more empathetic, and eventually, heroic. They even cross racial and gender boundaries, with quite a few male actors playing women and Black actors playing white characters. While some makeup choices certainly deserve criticism for their offensive nature, they work on a conceptual level: to break down the barriers between people of all kinds to reveal we are all the same. When Halle Berry is first seen as a Native islander in 1849, that history associated with her face carries over to her next life, a white Jewish heiress in 1936 England, giving this character a different existential context. Her soul steadily becomes more empowered in each new life. Tom Hanks’ characters change from murderers and thieves to passive, neutral characters until he is finally redeemed; Hugh Grant always appears as a villain; Keith David, a helpful and knowledgeable guide. Other recurrences include writings from the chronologically previous story, a star-shaped birthmark that appears on each of the main characters, and the Cloud Atlas Sextet, a piece of music composed by one of the protagonists. The directors’ intent is good-natured, if misguided; they’re pointing out that the racial roles and barriers the characters in Cloud Atlas deal with do not define them, but this can get lost when you put a white actor in yellowface like it’s 1961 and you’re making Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
This transformative use of actors makes sense coming from the Wachowski sisters, who themselves are trans. Their films are often concerned with discovering the truth of one’s existence and breaking free from the restraints of the previously assured reality. The power of their protagonists comes from accepting their true selves. Neo finds that he can manipulate reality within the Matrix in The Matrix Trilogy, then later that his role of savior and lead character of the story is doomed to repeat. Jupiter Jones discovers her status as inheritor of queen of a manipulative alien race in Jupiter Ascending, while Speed in Speed Racer purifies corruption in the world of pro racing through sheer passion for the sport. Cloud Atlas’s thesis is slightly different. The quality that makes an individual special – being human, alive and feeling and reacting – is what makes all of us special. While they may not have abilities past that of a normal human, each protagonist finds the strength to overcome in feeling empathy for others.
In the cyberpunk dystopia of 2144 Neo Seoul, a fabricant (artificial lifeform) by the name of Somni-451 (Doona Bae) watches her fabricant coworker get coldly killed off by their boss-cum-slaveowner after attacking a customer and attempting to escape. She does nothing to stop it, fearing for her own life as she looks on in horror. Immediately after, the hunter-gatherer Zachry’s (Tom Hanks) tribe, foraging for food, is attacked by a savage band of regressing sub-humans on the Big Island of Hawai’i in 2321. Similarly to Somni-451, Zachry is paralyzed by fear, choosing cowardice and watching his friends get brutally murdered while the physical manifestation of his doubts and internal darkness whispers into his ear. These two moments perform the same function in each character’s story: they realize their respective forms of oppression have become more than a distant worry. This pattern of scene sequencing repeats throughout the film; a scene of Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent) waking up in 2012 to find a nurse (Hugo Weaving) in an old folks’ home taking his keys is followed by Luisa Rey (Halle Berry) meeting the nefarious owner of a nuclear power company (Hugh Grant). With no concern for chronological order, we coast from scene to scene based on feeling first, rather than a logical order of events. In that way, Cloud Atlas is incredibly impressive in its construction. Every scene must continue the thematic strand of the last, develop it further, and set the stage for the next to grab the baton and run with it.
In film editing, two separate events are implied to happen concurrently by crosscutting between them; a scene of someone rushing to save their lover might be crosscut with the lover unwittingly walking into a trap somewhere else. Fragments of two or more parts are cut together with each other before they either converge or end, the same amount of time elapsing. Crosscutting also implies that each scene has an emotional dependency on the other. To return to the lover example, the audience wouldn’t feel as much suspense if we only saw the mad dash to save the lover but not the lover slowly walking to their doom. Or vice versa, where we only see the lover walking into a trap but are left not knowing anyone was rushing to save them. They’re incomplete without each other. The Wachowskis and Tykwer take this editing principle and use it to completely different ends, implying that these six stories’ space-time boundaries do not separate them. They influence and recontextualize each other. By connecting moments on the basis of emotion, these waves of feeling converge into a supreme emotional catharsis.
Some of these instances are fairly straightforward connections. Take the scenes where Autua (Davud Gyasi) manages the ship in 1849, swinging around on ropes, and Somni-451 crosses the bridge between skyscrapers in 2144. Both feature slaves, assisted by a friend played by Jim Sturgess, attempting to escape from certain demise over dizzying heights. Somni-451 faces the hovercraft that flies up to the bridge, and Autua is threatened by guns from the ship crew below. As the ship captain readies his piece to fire at Autua, soldiers burst in and fire at Somni-451 and Hae Joo-Chang (Sturgess). The threat of the ship crew, while they do not fire in 1849, is literalized in 2144; every time they aim at the mast, it quickly cuts to a shot of the hovercraft shooting the bridge. Furthering the association between these scenes is the moment where Hae Joo-Chang begins running across the bridge. A shot of his feet quickly dashing is matched perfectly by a smash cut to Autua’s feet running on the mast in the same exact part of the frame. The cutting continues back-and-forth like so until these events become inextricable to the viewer, the only difference setting. Although their outcomes are opposite, the tension in both scenarios is heightened. Again and again, this technique is used throughout Cloud Atlas to demolish the dividing lines between each story and make them one.
The crosscutting is taken to its most extreme conclusion in the sequences where short snippets from multiple stories are intercut, facilitating a maelstrom of feelings rather than physical struggle. The opening is the first clear example, where brief flashes of each main character are jumbled together in quick succession. It feels less like an introduction and more like an explosive birth from which everything else spills. But in what is likely the centerpiece of the film, the cross-cutting ties together the emotional climaxes of each story. Somni-451 and Hae Joo-Chang make love, Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) and his lover (James D’Arcy) imagine themselves smashing priceless china, Autua and Adam Ewing (Sturgess) gaze upon the sunset at sea as friends, and Zachry contemplates his mission with Meronym (Berry) by the fire. Frobisher’s narration of a letter to his lover directly states that all boundaries are waiting to be transcended; that they are arbitrary limits placed on them by the physical world. The smashing of the plates is not just the smashing of the plates, it is each thrust the lovers in 2144 give to each other. It is the two unlikely friends, Black and white, former slave and wealthy heir, staring at the sunset together. It is the tenderness with which Zachry covers Meronym with a blanket. In that moment, the characters from these four timelines all share that same intimacy. Their respective acts liberate them from their surroundings, and thus, make the audience realize their own restrictions are meaningless. They’ve broken the social, racial, and sexual boundaries of their respective times simply to connect with another human being.
The word “subtle” does not exist in Cloud Atlas’s vocabulary. In fact, it’s about as vague as a baseball bat to the face. But subtlety is often overrated, and especially needless when it comes to motivating people to overthrow their oppressors. Still, the movie should not work as well as it does: the antagonists are a cavalcade of Disney villains hopped up on speed, the plots for the individual stories are painfully generic, and the emotions are corny and broad, lacking any semblance of nuance. What makes it powerful is that, despite the fallibility of its characters, it is fundamentally optimistic that they can improve. Modern sensibilities dictate that film and television present a morally grey worldview closer to real life. Art that goes outside those limits is derided as corny or misleading as to “how the world works.” However, this new breed of aforementioned film and television rarely inspires the viewer to make any kind of change. The Wachowskis and Tykwer aren’t naïve; they know that massive change doesn’t happen overnight. Cloud Atlas affirms that, even if one small good deed seems like a drop in the ocean, it will ripple out for years and influence others to do good. For, in the words of Adam Ewing, “What is the ocean but a multitude of drops?”
