Actors Play Souls in Cloud Atlas
So brilliant! So beautiful! So heart warming! So soul touching! And so haunting. Over and over again, I couldn’t stop thinking about it days after I watched it, until I went to Wikipedia and printed out a list of cast of the movie; and watched it again.
The movie is mind-blowing because mind tends to think in linear, and this movie is not linear at all. To say the least, there are six different eras over two thousand years, six stories interrelated and interwoven, but the brilliance of the movie is that it’s not about six stories. What can you say when a movie is about “my life extends far beyond the limitations of me”?
The list of cast I printed out does help in understanding linear storylines, as the actors in the movie don’t just play characters but they actually play souls, who travel lifetime after lifetime, meeting each other over and over again. They do such an extraordinarily good job in makeup that it’s hard to follow who’s who in different lifetimes even though one actor carries out the same souls in different lifetimes. Some of the casts in the movie are sextuple, changing age, race and gender across the roles. You won’t probably catch or recognize their iterations. I strongly recommend staying for credit for a good surprise.
Yet I know I’m going to watch it again, probably again, without a care of who’s who, as I know this is also a movie to be enjoyed in its profundity, constant shifting just like clouds in the sky, mesmerization and visual and acoustic impact. In a sense, this movie is only about one story. A story about life, death, and rebirth – what you bring to life, and what choices you make in each moment. This is a movie, if you can follow at all on the first watching, that you can never be bored for one second.
Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. I believe there is another world waiting for us, a better one. And I’ll be waiting for you there.
I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.
Despite the negative reviews out there, this movie is a masterpiece. I know it will become future’s classic, when we are more acceptive to our interconnectedness and more understanding our soul evolvement.
It’s interesting that often movies show us where our collective unconsciousness is at, because we often explore concepts that are bubbling underneath the surface of collective consciousness through movies first.
Is this movie about reincarnation? It doesn’t really say so. I feel it goes even beyond that concept, though at one interview, Korean actress Doona Bae connected it with this Buddhist concept; but surely if you know reincarnation, this movie would make more sense to you. Oh by the way, what a great job Doona Bae did in acting Somni-451! I fall in love with her and Jim Sturgess’ Hae-Joo Chang. The scene when Hae-Joo Chang was shot to death and Somni continued to speak through broadcasting with tears rolling off also got me in tears.
Look at the sky. There is always a cloud atlas there. That is a map of souls’ movements across history.
