Cinema vs. Literature: The Case of Cloud Atlas

Hey I know it's a crazy debate that is considered tedious even by the people who engage in it and incredibly dull to the vast majority of people, but to me it's a somewhat important debate – also I've always wanted to get my piece in. In my life I have watched many movies that started out as books. I even watched a series of movies pull an entire genre out of leftfield and into the mainstream (the 'teenage girls + Lord of the Rings = Twilight' formula).

I never really want to do the research. One masterful post about 90's action movies Judge Dredd and Demolition Man is the one piece of film criticism I've ever attempted (I wouldn't even call criticism that by a mile), but the fact that it came together at all is a miracle and premised heavily on my understanding of the 1990s and action movies. I would never put on airs about film. I didn't study film, I am no expert, and if I couldn't write a decent bit about it I wouldn't even dare tangle with such heady stuff. Just kidding: nothing is sacred and film deserves an honest thrashing beyond my abilities.

But so do books, which brings me to today's post, which will take all of my faculties firing at once. Books and film. Easy target. Why not the Jurassic Park series? Why not the Harry Potter series? Well, both of those movie series are premised on books written in the 90s and I don't want to overplay my hand. I want to up the ante, though, so I'm taking it up to the 2000s and the 2010s. Cloud Atlas, the novel, was published in 2004 by an English author named David Mitchell. It was a rather engaging, spirited, and creative endeavor that consisted of six stories and their mysterious interplay throughout the novel. With no one narrative, or style, it was consistently engaging to read, and the nesting of the stories (like so: 1/2/3/4/5/6/5/4/3/2/1 ), and their content lent the final conclusion an epic sense. What a book, David Mitchell. Good work.

For years I had encountered brief allusions to the book, and some people I know had read it, but nobody had recommended it to me. Then I came across a trailer for the movie version and the race was on: I had to read the book before the movie came out. I was determined to do that and then also go see the movie. Naturally it took until this very week (8 months after release in my region) for me to actually see the movie. Life interceded, but I did find the book and read it.

Between a book and the film inevitably made about it there is a chasm so wide it cannot be imagined. A book can take a year to finish but a movie only has the audience's attention so long. Therefore, any attempt made to transcribe an entire book into a movie (even if the visual medium optimally condenses meaning and collapses the long-windedness of writing into digestible, filmable scenes) would fall completely flat or be ludicrous or run for 9 hours straight. Film buffs and hardcore book worms don't even have time for that: the two mediums are a world apart.

Turning the average book into a movie is hard work: lots of things have to be cut, dialogue has to be changed, the pacing has to be made effective for the screenplay to succeed. That's with a normal book, but Cloud Atlas has a narrative structure that's not as straightforward as, say, Lord of the Rings or Stephen King's It. So I preface my critique of the film by acknowledging that a ton of work went into it. As a result, the movie is beautiful. If there's one thing that it nailed in the opening half hour it is the different settings and their aesthetics. I won't say it's perfect or overwhelming, but the effort level is apparent.

Unfortunately, in the opening I discover that the book's conceit (itself kinda weak) of a Riddley Walker-esque post-apocalyptic speech translates VERY poorly to the big screen. Sometimes it works, but most of the time, just as in the book, it's a pain to follow. Except in the book it's part of a much more cohesive narrative and also a reader can take more pains to decypher what's going on. In the movie it looks good, though, and then it jumps into and through the other narratives to a title screen.

Tasteful. The problem with the movie (outside of the casting/makeup decisions which generated a bit of a racial shitstorm on their own) is that it simply cannot fulfill the demands of each of the six Cloud Atlas stories. Things are changed immediately: the Ewing Journal piece skips a lot of cool things (basically everything that happens on the island), the Vyvyan Ayrs story takes place in Edinburgh instead of Belgium (never alienate anglophone cinema-goers, the non-English world is incomprehensible to them). Characters are taken out, important scenes are dropped, so that the movie can lurch along in its way. At that point, readers of the book will get a solid idea of what they're in for.

Let's see. The Timothy Cavendish story is the one that suffers the least for being in a movie, but the tone of it is of course in stark contrast to the seriousness of the other stories. It's sort of a wacky adventure of an aging man who isn't entirely a hero. It works as a breath of fresh air EXCEPT there is all kinds of silliness throughout the movie because, yeah, the Wachowskis but more importantly moviegoers. Even the Luisa Reyes story, which is supposed to be an unrelenting mystery-thriller, has a few 'LOL moments' in it. If you take a look at the credits, the multitude of directors, producers... then it's no longer a wonder the movie is as chaotic as it is. Many people called it messy, and you have to admit they have a point. Oh, and David Mitchell wrote a piece last year about the process of transcription of literature into film. I think he glosses over the problematics more than he should for a man who clearly understands (if not overestimates) the process.

By the end of the movie anyone who has read the book will be a bit disappointed. The Sonmi-451 segment is tellingly warped into a brainless action movie with the most toothless criticisms of consumerism and a critically misused setting. In the book it's a legitimately interesting journey with some extremely poignant scenes, including one (which would've been so good in a movie) in which Sonmi-451 watches a petit-bourgeoise couple throw their daughter's living doll off a bridge to dispose of it. What I got from the movie is that the Sonmi-451 chapters (which were my favorite in the book) could function as the basis for an entire movie on their own. With a more intellectual team behind it than the Wachowskis it could actually function nearly as well as it does in the book. Instead you get all the intrigue for the first ten minutes of the movie-version (which is great), and then it degenerates into a bunch of people shooting Minority Report-style gravity hyper-laser guns at each other and there are hovercraft chases and explosions instead of a rousing takedown of the future of capitalist globalism and meditations on the sanctity of life versus the callousness of life shackled into industry.

'What are you doing to the source material?!'

Yeah but that could take hours, and it is truly challenging to imagine, and nobody's got time for that. Maybe, but what remains is so lumpy, gutless, and overproduced that the original narrative is lost entirely (even contradicted in multiple ways) and becomes a ridiculous, half-baked, bloated, hippy-dippy pastiche about universal love. I maintain it could've been done properly if less time and resources were spent on chase scenes, explosions, and CGI - and a bit of old-fashioned computer-enhanced story-telling took their place. The novel's Sonmi-451 story had so much heart and took place in such an evocative and interesting world that it's really a shame the movie managed to get so little of it right. For those who haven't read the book: imagine the above but applied in different ways to each of the other five stories. Then you have the problems with the movie in a nutshell: it's consistently lean in all the wrong places.

'The people have spoken: Star Wars: Episode 2-style action chases! With explosions!'

For all that I can't say I disliked the movie. It didn't blow my mind or transport me in raptures to some greater awareness. On the other hand it had legs. It was just, after seeing the trailer and reader the book, that I thought it was going to be a bit more faithful to the original work than it was. A lot of nuance was lost but the quality of the spectacle was more or less solid, even if I didn't always think it was necessary. The cinematography was excellent, the settings were well-done, fantastic high-caliber cast, production values all over the place, pacing was messy but generally effective. It's a beautiful movie, but it commits the cardinal sin of not being good enough to warrant the amount of attention it actually needs (unless you read the book, in which case feel free to dose on psilocybin and enjoy getting lost in the show).

The attention it demands of the viewer builds towards a rather disappointing, complex, involved climax. If you haven't read the book (and especially if you have) it can be completely underwhelming. Still, as far as movies go, this one offers you six stories for the price of one, which is a fair deal. I would recommend it to anyone who can enjoy film on a primal, visual level. The important thing with this movie, which I wasn't quite capable of, is divorcing it from what you know in the novel to be true and important. I would go on record as saying that Cloud Atlas is a de-rigeur beautiful disappointment. For a movie adopted from a book, the writing in parts is atrociously bad. You can find your own problems beyond the ones I pointed out. I lost my drive to do a comprehensive article around the time of the .gif I posted. Cloud Atlas is a capitol 'M' Movie, it is not high-cinema by a long shot, but it is sincerely ambitious. Buy the book, rent the movie: both are good for multiple engagements, but the book will really reward you for the time you spend with it.

Book into film: you lose nuance and replace it with spectacle. Truly not at all a groundbreaking conclusion, but what is important is that people keep trying to turn every book into a blockbuster movie, instead of developing original concepts into film. It would be interesting to chart a movie's transcription into a book - except that almost never happens.