Cloud Atlas

“Cloud Atlas,” the Wachowskis’ film adaptation of British novelist David Mitchell’s bestseller of the same name, is nothing short of a masterpiece.

The ambition of filming an episodic book whose author once lamented it as “unfilmable” is unparalleled and groundbreaking.

At the same time, it is one of the most sprawling, economical and brilliantly chaotic films ever made: a fitting piece for the capabilities of the screenwriter and German savant Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run”).

Devising a succinct, singular plot for “Cloud Atlas” is impossible.

The film tracks six stories: a notary’s Pacific expedition, a relationship between a composer and his randy protégé, a journalist’s fight against an evil energy empire, a publisher’s internment in a nursing home, a crusade against an Orwellian government and a tribesman’s post-apocalyptic quest for liberation. The tales encompass about 400 years.

In Mitchell’s novel, each of these stories is introduced, peeled off at a cliffhanger and later rejoined like the layers of a Matryoshka doll.

The film takes liberties with this approach and segues between its increments with clever finesse. An opened door on a 19th century frigate can bring characters into the bright lights and big scary city of Neo Seoul or the bloody war grounds of a still more distant future.

For all its tact, the maneuver can prove disruptive, though this isn’t a bad thing. Plot climaxes hinge for a while before they are satisfied, but the film is incapable of being disappointing, much less boring.

Like a toddler wired on pixie sticks, the energy packed into this behemoth is enough to supercharge a metropolis.

Say nothing about the film’s genre splicing, and it would still be a triumph of aestheticism with gratuitous violence, action and a feast-of-the-ears score to satisfy all audiences.

As for characters, each member of the film’s all-star cast plays five to seven varying roles. It’s Hugo Weaving who takes the cake here with his six successions of baddies, as varied as a melon-breasted nurse to a grinning shoulder-devil dressed in tattered Steampunk.

Never mind the inconsequential stumbles of a few abrupt camera shots or the exhaustion that comes with keeping an audience on a ride clocking in at two hours and 52 minutes.

“Cloud Atlas” stands as an avant-garde herald to the entertainment of which movies are capable. 

By Brandon Cook