Map of the clouds and beyond

Few movies can compare to this wonderful behemoth called Cloud Atlas.

This three-hour movie is told across thousands of years as stories parallel, pile-up and butt heads with one another. The core of the movie is made up of a dozen or so actors, but they all appear in each storyline — as stars in some, extras in others — and occasionally as other races or the opposite sex. Don't look to them for reassurance in this plot; you are destined to get lost. But I think that's the point.

Much will be made about "figuring out" the Cloud Atlas, but to appreciate it you must surrender before it stars. Just let the film wrap around you and close tighter. The plots are full of clues — comet-shaped birthmarks, sparkly pebbles and facial tattoos — but I'm convinced they are clues that lead nowhere except back to the beginning. It all feels very circular, but it never spirals out of control. This is a film that is guided by precise hands, six of them from three directors.

It is based on a book of the same name by David Mitchell. As best I can count it tells six simultaneous stories, though certainly there are more bits hidden within those. There is a plot in 1849 as an America man visits islands in the Pacific to find slaves, business deals and parasites. In the 1930s, a gay English musician creates his masterwork for a prominent composer. Another plot takes place in 1970s, when an intrepid reporter makes startling discoveries about nuclear energy. A modern-day story involves an old man running away from a gangster's thugs and finding an inhospitable boarding house. Two future storylines involve Sonmi-451, a female clone called a fabricant, and then a future race of primitive people who worship her.

I've told you the basic plots in chronological order — the film will have no such narrative compassion — yet I have also told you almost nothing about the film because it is more than the sum of its parts. There's so much to chew on that Atlas gives total freedom to the audience to decide what it all means.

Now I said the word "freedom," which presented itself (to me, at least) as a central theme. Many of the characters find themselves bound into lives they would not choose for themselves: Somni-451 is a programmed restaurant server in a dystopian Neo-Seoul, slaves in the Pacific are whipped into submission, the musician is blackmailed into servitude by the composer, and the primitive future cultures are threatened with enslavement and extinction. "Freedom is the fatuous jingle of our generation," one character says. But is this the answer? Perhaps one of many. I have never seen a movie that allowed — and encouraged — so many different interpretations from its audience.

The actors include Tom Hanks, Jim Broadbent, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving and South Korean actress Doona Bae, who plays Sonmi-451 in a standout performance. Most of them appear in every plotline, though you won't always recognize them thanks to the film's many prosthetic effects and facial masks. Stay for the end credits because the film shows you all their characters and some may surprise you, including Berry as a blond-haired white woman; I kept staring at her thinking, "I know this actress from somewhere." Each plot has its own flavor and style, and I appreciated Broadbent's plotline full of his English wit and timing. Hanks has some action scenes — as does Jim Sturgess during a Matrix-y hoverbike chase — and they are believable and kinetic. I should also mention Hanks' dialect and language in his future scenes; English hasn't sounded this fresh since A Clockwork Orange.

The movie is directed by the Wachowski siblings — Lana and Andy, of The Matrix fame — and Tom Tykwer, who directed another supposedly unfilmable novel, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. They managed to keep everything straight by breaking up principle photography, as if the Wachowskis were shooting one movie and Tykwer another. That sounds even more complicated, but they made it work. Their version of Cloud Atlas will be remembered alongside Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Terrance Malick's The Tree of Life as some of the most ambitious filmmaking in the history of the cinema. Many directors have undertaken complex tapestries of characters — Robert Altman and Alejandro González Iñárritu come to mind — but never before has a microcosm of interweaving stories taken on such an invigorating life of its own.

As for the ultimate question: What does it all mean? Well, if 10 million people see the film this weekend, then there are 10 million possible answers. And they're all correct. 

Lotsa photos below. All clickable. Try it.