Read An Excerpt
HERE
Read Liviu
Suciu’s Review of “Cloud Atlas”
Watch the Movie
Trailer HERE
AUTHOR/DIRECTOR INFORMATION: David Mitchell is an English novelist born in January 1969 and has
lived in Japan—you can really feel the Asian influence in his writing. He has
written five novels including Cloud Atlas,
which was shortlisted for the 2004 Booker
Prize,
Nebula Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and other awards. His latest novel, The Thousand
Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, was published in 2010.
Tom Tykwer is a director, writer, producer and composer born in
Germany in 1965. His filmography includes Run
Lola Run, Perfume: The Story of a
Murderer, and The International.
Lana & Andy Wachowski were born in Chicago
in the 1960s and are best known for writing/directing The Matrix Trilogy. Other works include V For Vendetta, Speed Racer and
Ninja Assassin.
FORMAT/INFO: Cloud Atlas
the novel was first published in 2004 by Hodder
& Stoughton in the UK and by Random
House in North America and is currently available in Paperback, Hardcover
and eBook.
The film adaptation of Cloud Atlas was released in North America on October 26, 2012 and in the UK on February 26, 2013. The film is 172
minutes long and stars Tom Hanks,
Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving,
Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant,
et cetera.
OFFICIAL PLOT SYNOPSIS: A reluctant voyager
crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious
livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor
Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a
genetically modified dinery server on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of
science and civilization—the narrators of Cloud
Atlas hear each others’ echoes down the corridor of history, and their
destinies are changed in ways great and small…
INTRODUCTION: When I learned that David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
was going to be adapted into a movie, I was intrigued. Could this subtle,
complicated story really be translated into a film successfully? The book
definitely had potential for a screen adaptation, but would the fragile link
between the different parts survive? Would it be possible to condense so many
time periods, characters and stories in just two to three hours? It was a major
challenge, and just for making the attempt, I really admire Lana & Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, but what did I think of the
movie? Find out below as I review Cloud
Atlas as both a novel and a movie.
ANALYSIS (Cloud Atlas—The Novel):
Cloud Atlas is certainly one of a kind to say the least, and it is definitely “intense”,
which is how my friend who recommended the book to me described it as. The six stories
composing the novel are beautifully and intricately linked together, while Cloud Atlas asks two critical questions
that is a wonderful reflection about humanity: Where might our hunt for more—more
power, more materialistic comfort, etc.—might drive us to, and whether humans
are reborn again and somehow linked to their past and future self? Yet Cloud Atlas is not a piece of Marxism or
an esoteric essay, and only two of the six stories possessed SFF elements, and
it is from these very characteristics that David
Mitchell’s novel takes its strength from.
NOTE: Click HERE
to read Liviu’s more comprehensive
review of Cloud Atlas and its six individual
stories.
ANALYSIS (Cloud Atlas—The Film
Adaptation): In Cloud Atlas
the movie, the directors decided not to keep the (relatively) linear
construction of the book which separates each story into two parts but Zachry’s. Instead, the six stories are
fragmented and run simultaneously to one another. This can be confusing for those
who haven’t read the novel and do not understand who the characters are.
Despite this, I think that overall the movie is really good: good acting and
good pacing, especially once you get used to the alternating stories. In
general, I find that the necessary (but painful for fans of the novel) cuts are
for the most part justified or understandable, including the suppression of
minor characters such as Arys’
daughter in Robert Frobisher’s story
for instance.
Yet I felt the book’s message had been slightly
distorted in the movie. This is partly due of course to the nature of movies
itself—showing instead of telling—but this still disturbed me a bit. For
example, I felt the romantic elements in each story were given too much importance
compared to the part they played in the book. This is classic Hollywood, fair
enough, but it seems to me that this focus on love only confuses the meaning of
the original story: instead of six characters linked together somehow, the
movie became the story of two lovers finding each other again and again (which
was a possible interpretation of the book, but not the main one…again in my
view!). All this while, the link between the individual stories—how each
character heard about their most recent alias—practically disappears, which was
such an important part of the novel’s construction.
Also, there is the fact that the same actors play more
than one character in the film. There is no indication whatsoever of such
resemblance in the book, except for the comet birthmark, and in my opinion this
made the film more confusing than anything for someone who has yet to read the
novel.
CONCLUSION: I
completely agree with Liviu when he
said that “Cloud Atlas is considerably more than the sum of its
parts and a novel that deserves all the acclaim it got.” The film adaptation of
Cloud Atlas has been well received as
well—it has been nominated and won several awards so far—and certainly serves
justice to the novel in many ways (the beautiful sceneries for instance,
especially in Sonmi’s story) and is
a worthy complement to the book, even if it allows less place for imagination, but
the movie doesn’t possess the subtlety of the novel and guides (too much in my
sense) the viewer on how to interpret the whole story. In short, Cloud Atlas is a good film adaptation,
but between the novel and the movie, I prefer the book version of Cloud Atlas...
12:00 AM | 
Posted by
Robert |
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2 comments:
What the hell happened to reviewing fantasy books?
While we review fantasy & SF books generally, from time to time we also like to review stuff that we love and which might not fit entirely in the fantasy genre like this book.
Mihir