Cloud Atlas (Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis, 2012)

[Mr Sausage]

I agree with you entirely, but I do think there's a little bit more here then mere continuity of souls breeding love eternal. The choice of connected actors strikes me as a coming out of the closet with the Wachowskis (I don't know what any of this does for Tykwer) with the set up being a, mind's pausing on me for the actual word I want, promotion and plea for transgender acceptance and understanding.

I'm intrigued. Tell me more.

[knives]

Polemic is the word I was thinking of earlier. That aside, and again I agree that the film is not successful, the fact that not only are the actors being recast, but they are being done so deliberately in ways that morph their identities dramatically and that their importance in the narrative is largely irrelevant seems to me to suggest that the reason for adapting is to speak, yes, about the soul, but more specifically to discuss the irrelevance of the appearance of the body to the identity of the soul. For example there isn't really any reason to include that Mexican woman in the Halle Berry plot let alone casting the Korean woman as her which must have cost a lot in makeup and of course she's not the only example of that. If it were merely about the eternity of love then these radical race and gender transformations wouldn't be necessary for such small characters. I specify the Mexican woman because if you wanted to argue it was to get all the actors into the story then you could easily have cast her as an old Korean lady.

I think that's also why we get the casting of the actors in such radically different roles. This is particularly true of Tom Hanks whose casting seems to develop this redemption across eternity story where he starts off as the most morally vile character and in each iteration gets less and less awful until in the story furthest in the future he if given the choice to save a life repeating in reverse his original sin, so to speak. The actor is the soul of the character, but the form of the body doesn't matter for this redemption.

[colinr0380]

To add to the other area of this, at least from the films I've seen, Tom Tykwer seems to have a particular interest in 'paths not taken/alternate path' stories and 'love being able to overcome all' structures which at least in Run Lola Run involves the ability to replay time to choose a better outcome and in The Princess and the Warrior seems to involve a strange moment at the end of the suddenly liberated character meeting himself and obscurely splitting into two and taking two separate directions now that he finally has a choice. Even something like The International has the envisioning of the central assassination from a different perspective.

In an interesting twist though most of the stories in Cloud Atlas involve characters attempting 'love overcomes all' and alternate paths but failing as they come up against impossible forces (both bad guys with human faces, or rather the face of Hugo Weaving, and abstract concepts such as racism, brutal repression of uprisings, institutional deprivation of liberty, conspiracies, jealousies, or just their own nature), which is perhaps where the more Wachowskian aspect of 'connected, interchangeable souls, but with an archetypal core' comes to the fore, as the individual stories might end sadly but on a cosmic level events are still moving on. You might not be remembered as the towering hero who succeeds against all odds, but your seemingly insignificant in the grand scheme of things story might be just as important as a catalyst for future generations to build upon.

According to imdb Tykwer apparently directed the 1936, 1973 and 2012 sections of the film, which seems to make sense as they feel the more grounded stories compared to the more fantastical settings that feel more suited to the Wachowskis. Its a bit of a push to suggest this but I guess if you wanted to you could perhaps see these paying homage to themes in his previous films! The 1936 section plays to the romantic and fatalistic aspects (say Run Lola Run), the paranoid thriller of 1973 could play into something like the espionage thriller of The International or terrorism-guilt-redemption arc of Heaven, and the whole nursing home detention setting in 2012 could be like the asylum in The Princess and the Warrior!