Why I hate the Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas

Boke

I didn’t start this blog to dunk on anything or bitch about media I dislike. Generally I try and support stuff I find interesting and share obscure things from the nooks and crannies of culture that I like and use what little of a platform I have here to shine some light on stuff I like and would like to see getting more support. Today’s post will be a rare departure from that. I’m not doing this because the thing under discussion is spectacularly bad to the point where it needs a major takedown but because in discussing why I don’t like it I think there’s something interesting to be said and possible lessons to be taken. 

Not that one

Cloud Atlas is a big screen adaption of a novel of the same name by the author David Mitchell, and that’s the author as opposed to the guy who played Mark on Peep Show and has published at least one book of nonfiction which may or may not be as good as Business Secrets of the Pharohs and of whom I confess I am a bit of a fan. Different David Mitchell they just share a professional name.

Anyway, I very rarely will not finish a film I’ve set down to watch after the first couple of minutes but the time I tried to watch Cloud Atlas was one of the rare occasions where I tapped out. I don’t recall exactly at which point but it felt like ages in and I have not attempted it again.

I had been looking forwards to it too. I had generally liked the Wachowski sister’s work. As a devotee of Alan Moore Thought I had been disinclined to like any V adaption but with a few criticisms and caveats I ended up liking their version and consider it one of the few “good” Moore adaptions. I loved the Matrix and have time for the sequels, inferior though they are, and consider The Animatrix some of the best cyberpunk media. I also liked the book which I read in one go on a particularly long bus trip from Sheffield to Belfast. On paper the two seemed like a good fit. They’d done complex sprawling sci-fi before, surely they could do this?

Well, no. As much as I hate people who are real purists over source material in this one instance I am very much that guy. My fundamental gripe with it is that they abandoned the structure of the books, the sextette structure which to me seemed like the whole point of the novel was ditched to make it more palatable and they hollowed out a lot of the important stuff in favour of the least interesting most superficial parts. 

If you’re not familiar with the book or don’t know what a sextette is, let me explain.

A sextette is a structure often found in classical music but not elsewhere. If you have an interest in classical and have a favourite composer look it up, they may well have one. What you have is a piece composed of six distinct parts that can sound quite different or similar but with a different lead instrument but have consistent musical themes that connect them all as a singular piece. 

What David Mitchell did was to go, cool, what if I did a book like that? A single book composed of six parts that each feel like their own thing, of different genre, written in a different style like they’re from different authors with some loose connective tissue in the story but consistent themes of enslavement, exploitation and captivity. The book starts with the first section of which you get the first half, then the first half of the second and so on up to the sixth part which plays out in its entirety, finishing followed by the rest of the fifth then the fourth and so on backwards until you get the second half of the first section, finishing where it started. I don’t know if that’s a common way of arranging a sextette in music or Mitchells innovation but that’s what the book is and it’s a cool and interesting read. He very much frontloads the significance of the structure with the title, in the book The Cloud Atlas Sextette is a piece of music that appears in different parts of the text at crucial junctures, the second story being concerned to some extent with its composition.

The Sextette of stories also go backwards and forwards through time. Part 1 is set in the 19th century, part 2 later in the early 20th, and so on till we get to 5 which is set in the cyberpunk far future and the last section in its post-apocalyptic further future.

The film ditches the structure altogether, this is its cardinal sin.

They are, aye

To illustrate why that’s an issue I’ll now bring up the Peter Jackson Lord Of The Rings Trilogy as a point of comparison, specifically the second two films. In the Two Towers and Return of the King novels there's a two book structure, first book follows everyone except Sam and Frodo around Rohan and Isenguard, mostly Aragorn Legolas and Gimli but eventually Gandalf, Merry and Pippin as the first group catches up with them and get filled in on what they've been up to. Book 2 is all Frodo, Sam and Gollum as they approach Mordor over roughly the same timeframe as the previous section. In The Return of the King, same kind of deal first book everything else in the War of the Ring from the fall of Isenguard up to the survivors of the siege of Minas Tirith heading off to the Black Gate for the show down with the forces of Mordor. The last book then picks up with the ringbearer party where they left off at the end of The Two Towers and follows them to mount doom and beyond to the end.

Now do the films stick to that structure? Nah. It’s fine on the page but it there wouldn't be any point doing it that way on film. The films flit between what's going on at a given time with the two or three different groups of characters, sometimes using those to set up little mini cliff-hangers etc. It’s all good because in the language of cinema it makes perfect sense.

In the film Cloud Atlas, like in Jacksons The Lord of The Rings, they ditch the structure in favour of skipping between the stories and in this case it doesn't work, because you're unmoored in time skipping between six discreet stories with minimal connection to each other up and down the shared timeline instead of between things that are happening at around the same time across different locations. It’s a constant random churn. Many critics of the film find this not just needlessly abrasive to the senses but literally confusing. A common observation of the film even from its defenders is that it is hard to know what is actually going on without having read the book. That to me is a fundamental flaw. You shouldn’t have to know the source material of a thing that’s been adapted to parse it. If it doesn’t stand on its own two feet as an art-object in itself then what is the point of it? A film that been adapted from something else can choose not to follow the source and have a certain ambiguity that the source makes explicit and still be good, great even. I’ve not read it but I have read that in the novel Under The Skin the motivations of the alien MC are much les subtle and its got a much more explicit message. Does that mean that the film is “solved” since reading the book answers a lot of the questions and dispels the ambiguity cultivated by the film? Nope, the film is its own thing, the mystery adding to the vibe and its purposefully just showing you the events and letting you draw your own conclusion. Or another classic example would be Blade Runner, in the novel Phil K Dick has no time for moral ambiguities, Batty and Crew are canonically baddies and less than human, Dekkard gets gaslit into thinking he might be a replicant for a couple of chapters but definitely isn’t. In that sense the book is imo worse than the film. People can make sense of these films on their own terms. They aren’t just literally confused by the editing.

Another thing that I don’t like is that the things in the books outside the structure that connect each of the stories are very loose, subtle and intangible. These are brought to the fore in the film and what was subtle made explicit to the detriment of the themes. Some of the characters in the different timelines share a birth mark which seems to imply that they are either related or are reincarnations of each other. The book doesn’t dwell on this point or its significance, the film makes a big deal out of it. It was never what the book was supposed to be about. When you see the film being described like on IMDB or something it always gets brought up.

I feel like all this fuckery was only done because if they'd kept something like the original sextette structure in the screenplay it would have been deemed too weird to ever get out of the slush pile even with that cast and the pre-Jupiter Ascending Wachowski sisters behind it. I could imagine an indie film doing this and it being deemed too “Art House" just on that basis. The production of Block Busters is a lot more regimented and formulaic than would allow for something like that. Without the structure they had to make the film about something, hence the over emphasis on that loose connective tissue. This was just about the end of race swapping actors not being considered really bad crack so we get Tom Hanks in Yellowface because of this.

Could it have been better had they stuck to the structure? Wellll…. I’m not sure that a feature film would be the right medium in the first place and can’t help but think that it might have been better as prestige TV. In a show they could say do it as six episodes in two parts with each having the first two parts of the story then episode 4 finish the second half of part six and five and the rest in descending order. They could keep the essence of the book by having the different sections being shot in a different style even different film stock and all that like retro film producers do, eg Mandy, The Love Witch, The Lighthouse and the films of Mark Jenkin. The section with the composers in black and white, the spy stuff like a 60s American TV, doing The Orison of Soom-Yi like a cyberpunk anime and preferably in the classic OVA style, the bit in the old folks home like a 90s British TV drama etc. I reckon the structural weirdness would be something a modern prestige TV watching audience would be up for now in a way that film goers of the early 2010s wouldn’t have.

I don’t know if that will ever happen. These are just my thoughts.