I just got home from watching The Cloud Atlas. My brain is reeling. What an amazing piece of film. For those who don’t know here’s the Wikipedia entry:

Cloud Atlas is a 2004 novel, the third book by British author David Mitchell. It consists of six nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. It won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award and the Richard & Judy Book of the Year award, and was short-listed for the 2004 Booker Prize, Nebula Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and other awards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)

The six stories are all linked by kindness and cruelty, love and hate and many more themes. My brain is only now starting to piece some of them together. It is directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer. Tykwer directed a wonderful movie that very few have seen called Run Lola, Run.

Within the Cloud Atlas are some really neat nods to the Matrix series and Lola. I picked out several at a glance, but I’m sure there were many more. Hugo Weaving as a futuristic archivist channeling Agent Smith. The t-boned car from the alley a la Lola’s father are but a few.

There are some beautiful and imaginative pieces in this movie. I left thinking more about what I saw than trying to critique the acting or script. Outside the theatre there were more people doing this sort of critical thinking out loud to their friends. Since I was alone it would have looked strange if I had talked out what I was thinking. Hence the blog post.

As a Christian I know the redemption story and the philosophy that this entails. However, as a fan of science fiction and fantasy I am always wondering if there is a somewhat different reality that I may be missing. Or if what this other philosophy is dealing with might somehow be linked to what I believe and I just don’t understand it yet.

We are linked to the past, more than we might think we are. We often remark how babies look like so and so or children behave like their parent or grandparents in some way. While I am not a believer in reincarnation this link between the past must exist. Somewhere at a genetic level there must be a memory that links the past and the present. Are we all unique, or are we somewhat recycled individuals? The movie makes an interesting link to the food chain of replicants, and we are breathing in the air that others have breathed for years, maybe there’s a link in our DNA that is just as strong.

I’m not sure at this stage, but like the movie Inception I will need to watch a few more times before I really “get it”. Next time I’ll bring Maggie along and we can actually talk out loud and I will not look like a crazy person. You should really go see this movie, though. Well worth the money and parking charge.