CLOUD ATLAS

Leaving the theater scratching my head I was told this movie reminded one of the story of a man showing a card trick to a chicken.  The chicken knows that it has seen a card trick but it can not explain any of it.  David Mitchell's novel of the same name, Cloud Atlas refers to a "sextet with overlapping soloists," a musical composition of fetching beauty whose sheet music contains notes that convey the movement of clouds soaring, gliding, tumbling across skies. Now an epic film,(by time length standards) by Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski, Cloud Atlas is embraced from a series of plot strands: Its ideas are paralleled, its themes twinned, into what may be described as 164-minutes of visually stunningnesseeminglyness.  Yes that is word I came up with, and as I expected, it soared as often as it thuded.

The film is opened by an old tribesman, Zachry (Tom Hanks), who sits by a fire and speaks of "all the voices tied up into one," turning his face to reveal a scar whose origins we'll understand, like the birthmarks and familiar traumas that unite characters across each of the film's six stories, as an inheritance. Each story engages with unique social conditions from our human history and foreseeable future, though all are connected by the idea that the lives of its characters, citizens of places as far-flung as late-19th-century San Francisco and a primitive, post-apocalyptic Hawaii, aren't their own.
 Cloud Atlas is a series of six stories intertwinned to tell one story.  The major actors have roles in all six stories Hanks does a marvellous job as expected as does Halle Berry, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, James D'Arcy, Jim Broadbent, Susan Sarandon and Hugo Weaving fill out their duplicate roles well.
I found an overstated theme of THE STRONG EAT,THE WEAK MEAT a bit too much as the film addresses its obsession with humanity's struggle to suppress the cannibal within.
Throughout Cloud Atlas, a star here becomes a supporting player there, a means of superficially drawing links between the film's six stories.  But sometimes the faces and voices that carry between the film's intertwined stories are haunting, as when Doona Bae, playing a clone hungry for self-actualization in the Wachowskis' perfectly chilly, often dazzling "An Orison of Sonmi~451," meets her doom and crops up, in "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing," as the notary's wife, looking toward enlightenment with eyes that have literally seen the future.

Cloud Atlas is a film that could of been shorter and that might have helped.   I feel like a chicken.