Cloud Atlas Thoughts

I finally saw Cloud Atlas today and found it both very interesting but also very confused film that I don't think ever really hit its mark. I think it's a movie that is trying to tell us about the human condition and our existence, but when you're telling a SciFi movie like that, you really must make sure your audience does actually understand your meaning, otherwise it can come off as random incoherent babbling. Sadly Cloud Atlas, though commendable for trying to be intelligent SciFi and more than just another explosive movie, feels like it is heading for this big crescendo revelation that it never quite happens.
I'm not really sure what story this movie was trying to tell. That we're all connected? I guess but that's kinda implied before you've even watched the movie.
Was it about souls, love, slavery, the afterlife?

I will admit I have not read the novel this was based on but I have heard that it was good. However, a work of art should stand on it's own, and while unlike many of my pompous contemporaries I find that some of the film adaptations are often better than the original source material. An example of this for me is the Lord of the Rings films, which I felt were far more succinct and felt stronger in overall narrative than the books. Those films did not need any "homework" to understand the movie and Cloud Atlas should be no different. In the end I was very confused by the movie and that's not a good sign. Any one of the stories in the movie would have actually worked very well as singular movies, but even with the 3 hour runtime none of them quite get the development they need and instead it all comes off as an incoherent mess. Any of these stories would have worked better than the whole in the end. Because there is no truly tying thread to it all, nothing that would make an audience member say "Ah riiiight I get it now" this is what it's all been about.

In many ways it has a similar problem that I feel Game of Thrones has too, but where that show succeeds in many ways because of the length and uniting threads of the story. Instead in the end the movie gets lost in its own mythos, unable to have a single theme and trying to tell multiple ones about our existence with nothing to tie them together except perhaps that they're all human experiences. But that's not enough in the end and the movie just doesn't work overall.

I have a theory about movies, they should get better every time you watch them, but at the same time they should get their point across and their general message on the first viewings the rest is in the details. On this part Cloud Atlas fails, and quite miserably so.

 It's a shame really because ever since films like Inception,  I'd hoped intelligent but interesting mainstream SciFi was making a comeback. When I'd heard about this fascinating jaunt through time by the creators of The Matrix, I'd hoped that something might come out of this that would be awesome, instead we got this, a movie that I'm sure made perfect sense in the minds of its creators but was a complete convoluted mess on the screen in the end. What was its meaning? I have no idea, it's clearly trying to convey a multitude of them but as such loses its focus and basically just says "Hey, um... Reincarnation!" without really stating its implications or what this story is trying to tell us.

Art and Science: One in the Same

I hate the implication that art is just purely subjective; it's not. If it were Transformers 2 and Twilight would be masterpieces heralded for eons to come. Art is, when you boil it down, a science. When people say “Art is just opinions, just because you like something that's just your opinion". It really annoys me, especially as a writer, I feel more qualified to judge what is and what is not good writing. Just like I wouldn't look at a dance routine and say to the dance pro "I think you're doing it all wrong!" 

I refute the idea art is purely opinion and subjective viewpoints. It's not, that's why there are Arts degrees, we are taught how to do things right and how not to do things. It's all predicated from the human belief that we're all completely unique individuals when as much as we'd like to believe it, that's a lie we tell ourselves, we're not all that unique, we're not even that genetically diverse a species let alone personalities that form from social norms and ideas.

There are breakthroughs in art, in film people like Tarrantino, Welles, Scorsese, Copolla, Wilder, they were break through artists. But they just created something "good" that hadn't been done before. There is a universality (is that a word) to our collective experience, it's why Shakespeare is often considered the greatest writer of all time, because what he wrote was universal, it was human themes; revenge, love, hate, trickery e.t.c.

Everything at the end of the day can be boiled down to science. I think art is a science at the end of the day, just an extremely complex one that we don't fully understand the implications of how it affects us. People who have studied a science know more about it, a marine biologist knows more about his field than I do. Just like I know more about art in writing than he likely would. Art is the most complex of sciences because it deals with a level of human psychology we've only just begun to scratch the surface of even today.

By this precept, it is critical analysis and thinking that is evolving over time with new elements being constantly introduced into the field; experts of the craft understand it better than most. Ironically as I write this the "experts" of my own field are the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whom I disagree with on a yearly basis at the Oscars. In this sense, art is not subjective, it is critical, it is logical, it is a complex logic, but it is logic non-the-less. Art is something we enjoy and "experts" figure out why we enjoy it. Rather like how a chemist would figure out how a drug makes us feel.

There's an old saying:

"If the human mind were so simple we could understand it, we would be too simple to understand it."

Art is based on facts, very complex facts that we don't understand yet and may never understand in the course of human history. Which is why for me it's so important to understand art, because I believe it is the key to human enlightenment and expansion. The highest form of complex science is the arts. When we as humans, limited in our capacities create something as infinitely complex as the Mona Lisa, the Parthenon, Citizen Kane, Let it Be – it proves that perhaps, just perhaps, we’re not as limited as we might think.

So... yeah.