Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas...First of all..wow.
After watching the trailer and the fact that you wanted us to watch it did make me think that I would have to think deeply while watching the movie, but I didn't think it would be this crazy. I was mind blown by this movie; I'm writing this right after I got back from the movie so this is actually my initial reaction. I don't even know if it's a good mind blown or a bad mind blown but just simply mind blown...

The story is based on six different time periods. 1. about the time when slavery was prevalent 2. a time a little after that with a composer 3. about the 1970s with Halle Berry as a reporter 4. 2012 5. a future time period with Neo Seoul as the the setting and 6. a even more futuristic period with a valley tribe and cannibals. All these time periods are connected by characters and other small details. In the beginning of the movie, I was looking at the details for connections to the concepts that we learned about in class. But as I watched the movie more I realized that it was a much huger picture that and it wasn't about finding small details that related to the concepts we learned about.

I could summarize the movie here but that would just be pages and pages of words for I'll just think about a few themes that I thought about after I watched the whole movie. (There wasn't even time to think about stuff during the movie.)

One major theme that was probably the most obvious was reincarnation. The movie was built that one actor played multiple characters in different time periods. At first I didn't notice, but as the movie progressed I began to recognize the actors and actresses that would appear multiple times but as different people. If you think about each actor's characters in chronological order you can see that each character changes as a person in that they are either born as a very lowly person and reincarnates numerous times to become a high person in the end. Or the other way around a higher person continues to reincarnate to a lower person. I thought this was a theme that made the movie most interesting. I also think that this theme might be the main one that most people saw but I thought of some more.

At the end of the movie, the female clone character Somi 451, said something about how "from womb to tomb, our lives are not our own" and that we are all bounded to one another. This was how all the stories were connected because each decision that a character made in the past affected another character in the present and the future. Another way all the characters were connected was by pieces of writing which I thought was interesting because our class is based on sacred texts. Although the texts that connected all of them weren't religious or necessarily sacred, I wondered what the meaning behind the connection through the texts exactly was.

Another main theme in my opinion was about how important making decisions were. Each character made a decision that was highly unlikely such as the lawyer helping the stowaway slave or Tom Hanks helping Halle Berry even though he wasn't sure to trust her or not. These decisions aren't what most people would think to do but these risky decisions are what affect future generations.

The last thought that I had on the movie was that it seemed extremely open to interpretation, again related to Hermeneutics. I expected there to be a huge conclusion at the end that would tie it all together but there wasn't, meaning that the movie was open to any sort of interpretation. There are probably many more interpretations on this which made the movie even more crazy to me.

Honestly, I didn't know what the movie was about at all because the trailer really didn't show much. However, the movie shocked me and I am surprisingly intrigued by it. I don't know if I'm going to be able to get it out of my head for a while.....