Cine Me

Cloud Atlas

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/

 

 “Cloud Atlas” is a movie about migratory souls and wayward civilizations, loaded with soaring themes and flights of feeling, as vaporous and comprehensive as its title. Big ideas, or at least earnest intellectual conceits, crowd the screen along with suave digital effects and gaudy costumes. Free will battles determinism. Solidarity faces off against domination. Belief in a benevolent cosmic order contends with fidelity to the cruel Darwinian maxim that “the weak are meat the strong do eat.”

 

 

It is a movie that is a product of our age of internet-driven universal knowledge and vision, and the freedom we have to travel the world and jump between ages, genres, images and identities at our will. It reminds us that we are human and that we can still hear our heart beat, if we listen.

 

But the New York Times' A.O. Scott finds "Cloud Atlas" to be "an unruly grab bag of styles, effects and emotions held together, just barely, by a combination of outlandish daring and humble sincerity." Still, he muses," "maybe the achievement of 'Cloud Atlas' should be quantified rather than judged in more conventional, qualitative ways. This is by no means the best movie of the year, but it may be the most movie you can get for the price of a single ticket."

When you put it that way, six stories, 500 years and 172 minutes in one movie isn't just ambitious — it's also a bargain.