Cloud Atlas is a pretty good film despite its not so good reputation (which is also a reason why I only watched it now and not back in 2012). What impressed me the most was how well it was edited. The movie simultaneously tells six stories from different time periods and genres, all connected through themes and characters. Normally I would have been annoyed with such frequent jumping from one scene to another and another, but instead of being jarring, Cloud Atlas achieved a nice feeling of fluidity. These jumps between stories are deliberate, not random, as if there’s a single thread going through space and time which we’re following. This is film editing master level.
Another enjoyable thing about this ambitious film is that the actors played multiple roles across the different stories. That certainly strengthened the reincarnation theme or maybe just the idea that times change but people will always be people. I personally really liked Hale Berry as the journalist Luisa Rey and Ben Whishaw as the tragic composer Robert Frobisher. The publisher Cavendish’s story was the most comedic and absurd, but it also had the most iconic scene of a writer/thug guy throwing a critic off a tall building during an award party for criticizing his book. It’s certainly going to stay with me for a long time.
