For those who fear that the withering film review is a dying art, it isn’t. To wit, The New York Observer’s unrelenting pan of Cloud Atlas:
All you can do while you puzzle over it like a board game is try to figure out which member of the hammy all-star ensemble, unrecognizable in lurid makeup, wigs, period costumes and rubber prostheses, is playing which man—or woman—while the viewer-unfriendly screenplay squirts and splatters all over the place. Characters fade into and out
of past, present and future centuries with the grace of a battering ram. They include Tom Hanks, in his worst performance since Joe Versus the Volcano, as a crooked doctor who looks like Benjamin Franklin on the Pacific Ocean in 1849; a balding cockney skinhead who becomes a pop celebrity by throwing a critic off the roof of a literary party in 2012, and a dark-skinned one-eyed native goat-herder (you can’t make up this stuff) in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, in 2346,
babbling away in a language that hasn’t been invented yet.
Ouch.
We first came across David Mitchell’s novel when Time Released Sound issued their Chocolate Box Series, which included Four Peaks by Sonmi451, AKA Bernard Zwijzen. The character of Sonmi451 first appears in Cloud Atlas as a clone waitress, although she is eventually worshiped as a deity for being set up, encouraged to learn, and inspiring a revolution. (Most reading is banned in this dystopian vision of a future, unified Korea.)
Anyway, it sounds like we should stick with the book. And with Zwijzen.
