Cloud Atlas in Movie Form

Unsatisfactory. That is a generous description of how Cloud Atlas was in movie form. In fact I did not end up finishing the movie. I got to about two thirds of the way through and decided that I did not want to continue watching. I wish I could get that $3.99 back... It probably was not as bad as I am making it seem, but having watched it after just recently finishing the book made it all the more unsatisfactory.

I was sufficiently annoyed at the movie's deviance from the plot in the book. I understand that the book would be extremely difficult to recreate as a movie, but the movie does the book little justice. I realize that this post sounds fairly harsh so far, so I will first credit Tom Hanks at playing his many roles very well. Also Halle Berry fits Luisa's role just how I imagined her to be. Other than that, I pictured the other characters as much different looking. I also thought a few characters from the movie did not act as I thought they should based on the book.

Frobisher has a completely different personality in the movie than he does in the book. In the book Frobisher seemed arrogant, slightly aggressive, and extremely stubborn. Whereas, in the book he was at first portrayed as passive, and did not stand up for himself to Ayrs like he had in the novel. I thought that this was an important part of his character, and that the movie took this component away.  For example, Ayrs taunts Frobisher, asking if he has "mastered 'Three Blind Mice'?" So Frobisher slyly sat down and "played the syphilitic crank 'Three Blind Mice', after the fashion of a mordant Prokofiev". Ayrs also states that he "needs a little time to decide whether or not [he] can find use for [Frobisher's] gifts", and Frobisher mocks Ayrs by saying the same thing back when Ayrs hastily admits that he wants Frobisher to help him compose music. This is the sort of fire from Frobisher is missing in the movie.

I thought that the Somni part had some components to it that were portrayed well in the movie. I enjoyed how the Papa Song's restaurant was shown to be based on the customers interactions with the genetically engineered servers. I also thought the collars with the stars indicating the years worked at Papa Song's on them stayed true to the book. I did not like most other depictions of the Somni story in the movie. It skipped over the part where Somni lives with a college student where she acquires lots of knowledge. The movie also adds in a sexual relationship between Yoona~939 and the leader of that particular Papa Song's, which I did not think was the point of Yoona standing out.

Lots of relationships were added in to the movie, that were not included in the book. I thought that some of the relationships changed the meaning of the characters juxtaposed to one another. For example, Frobisher had a sexual relationship with Sixsmith which makes their friendship become something entirely different. I also did not think that the relationship between Zachary and Meronym should have been added. The only relationship that was not in the book that I thought worked well in the movie was the one between Somni and Hae-Jo Chang. It showed that Somni was capable of emotions just like any other human, even though she was genetically engineered.

Overall, the book was a thousand and five times better than the movie! Like most books do, Cloud Atlas has a lot more depth than the movie, and was much more thought provoking. In order to understand the full meaning of the concept that David Mitchell was trying to get across, one must read the initial source; the book.

AP Worthiness...

As I read the last line to the last page of the book Cloud Atlas, I cannot help but want David Mitchell to write a couple more pages on the meaning of the sections altogether. This afterthought forced me to realize, the answers to the question of the meaning of the book should not be given to me like a beautifully wrapped present. Instead, I had to dig for the meaning and use a useful tool that lives in my skull. 

I have no doubt in my mind that the book Cloud Atlas is AP worthy. It forced me to take a lot of time to stretch my thinking process about the hidden meanings of the book. In fact, I think it took me at least halfway through the book to start grasping the connections throughout the different sections. Small details of birthmarks, character struggles, and time periods eventually started weaving together a large meaning. The reincarnation piece is only mentioned twice in the second half of the book, although it is not mentioned in reference to the connection of characters in the sections, but rather as an idea that someone like the character Zachary from "Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After" believes in. 

The amount of allusions that I did not understand in this novel was more than my hands and toes could count. A lot of the allusions were from the section "Letters from Zedelghem". One musical allusion from that section was when Zedelghem wrote "Scientific papers are coauthored, yes, and a composer might work with a virtuoso musician to explore the boundaries of the playable- like Elgar and W.H. Reed..." Now I had no idea who these people that Zedelghem was alluding to were, along with many other allusions that were made. I had to look up these people and found out that William H. Reed was a violinist, conductor, and composer, who wrote about and used the paintings of Edward Elgar, who was an English composer and painter. I was forced many times to stop in the middle of a paragraph and look up names, songs, or any other allusions Mitchell threw at me. 

I also had to constantly look up words in the dictionary. In the sections of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" many words that were foreign to me were used. This resulted in lots of pausing and application of new words to sentences from the book. I also could figure out lots of words by means of context, which is very important for an AP student to do, especially on the AP English test. Not only were certain words hard to understand, but entire sections used language in difficult ways. The section "Sloosha's Crossin' An' Ev'rythin' After" slowed down my reading a lot, because I found that I had to reread sentences and sound out letters in ways I haven't seen them put together. An example of a difficult sentence from this section is when Zachary says "Lady Moon rose an' gazed o'er my busted'n'beautsome Valleys with silv'ry'n'sorryin' eyes, an' the dingos mourned for the died uns". It takes a little bit longer to comprehend the full meaning. 

For these reasons and others, I believe that Cloud Atlas is an AP worthy book, and I recommend it as a fun challenge of a read for students who are enrolled in AP English, or just generally a good book all around.