Cloud atlas: See it for Hanks

Cloud atlas
Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon
At: DT Cinemas & others
Rated: 5/10
It has everything going for it — an awesome star ensemble, a part sci-fi, part period, part contemporary drama, a big canvas and a intricately intertwined stories of many eras. So why is that it sits uncomfortably on your shoulders. Perhaps, because it is just too complicated? Or, may be, because it gets to be overly ambitious in its bid to jump wide apart ages, or may, because it is an amalgamation of all these factors.
Whatever it is, despite the presence of the likes of Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon and a host of other stars, Cloud Atlas does not entirely click or overawe.
From 2041 to backwards into pre-historic times where clan king Tom Hanks converses in a strange language with sci-fi woman Halle Berry, the string gets caught in too many webs. Apparently, the message is that all lives have a bearing on future lives, that very many past actions shape your thinking and incidents in other lives.
So you have many Halle Berry and many Tom Hanks in different eras and with a different set of problems, but mostly amid a fight between right and wrong and the triumph of good over evil. There’s a gay thing too thrown in for somewhat Victorian variety but that’s the story that gives this one a lot of overt humanism.
By the way, you may not like the movie but Tom Hanks is brilliant. Go for him.
Source: Published in Sunday Pioneer, October 28, 2012

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