I think that one's a cumulus

[andrewducker]

I just discovered that The Wachowskis are making a movie out of Cloud Atlas. With Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Natalie Portman.

I can't see how they can do this without destroying the structure of the book. Spoiler for the structure of the book follows - no spoiler for plot, hence I'm not doing an LJ-Cut, unless people complain.
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The book is structured as six stories, with the first half of each one followed by the first half of the next one, until we reach number six, and then we get the second halves of each one in turn, until we arrive at the first story again, to read its conclusion.

So, that's six stories, each with split into two halves, or 12 story fragments. Even if we assume that they have three hours to play around with, that's 15 minutes per fragment. Is that really enough to pull the viewers into a story, join it to the parts before and after, and tell something coherent? I'm doubtful, to put it mildly.

Now, I do love films that can pull off the twisty-turny narration. There's a bit in Reservoir Dogs that's three levels deep, and I love the structure of The Prestige, but this feels like something that's too large to bite off and also make a mainstream movie from.

And I don't mind gutting a book to make it into a film - pulling the essence out of it and streamlining it by leaving out (or changing) a chunk of the plot to fit the constraints (and advantages) of film is something I thoroughly approve of. But the heart of Cloud Atlas _is_ its structure.

So you can colour me intrigued. But I'll be utterly unsurprised if it's a failure. They've got good people onboard though, including writer Tom Tykwer, who made Run Lola Run and Perfume (and The International, which I heard was good, but haven't seen yet.)

Comments

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I really like his writing. But he's too ambitious and doesn't quite have the talent to back it up -- CA is basically 6 short stories, chopped up and spliced together so he can call it a novel. I don't find they have anything in common other than mentioning each other to create nesting (which is flawed too... it jumps a fiction level at one point). Also the two centremost ones suffer from the annoying effect of 'mainstream writer tries to do SF and doesn't quite get it'.

But curious to see what it becomes at a film, yes.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Heh. I thought they had so much in common that the second half became a bit of a POWER CORRUPTS bludgeon.

Also, for the record, Mitchell has read plenty of genre sf. Wrote reviews for the BSFA for a couple of years in the early nineties, too.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just me -- I find it the switch into SF so jarring.

[andrewducker]

I think I found it jarring too, to be honest. I hadn't clicked that after a story in the past, near past, very near past and present that the obvious next place was the future. I guess lots of things only feel obvious to me in retrospect :->

[andrewducker]

The stories were all about ascent and descent and power. There's lots of imagery on those themes running through all of them.

I wouldn't count the change of fiction levels to be a flaw, I thought it was another echo of the general theme of changing levels.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Mhh-hmm. Maybe the whole thing was just too subtle for me...

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Well, some of the segments are heavy on interiority and light on plot -- so at a guess, if they keep them all (and they may well cut down to, say, three, one past, one present, one future) they'll make some of them quite brief, just framing devices really rather than stories in their own right. Probably not quite as brief as the opening of Serenity, but perhaps along those lines.

The irony is I don't think it would work all that well as a TV series either, since I think the effect requires that continuousness of story for maximum impact.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I was thinking they could nest them down to three (or three around a fourth), or do some "play within a play" on some of the aspects .... but really it sounds like you could drop a couple without losing "the plot" :-)

[andrewducker]

Yeah - if they were doing it as a TV series I'd want the switches to come mid-episode, not between them.

[e-halmac.livejournal.com]

Want to read the book now. May be I should wait until after the movie, in case it is pants.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

Are the Wachowskis up for something that complex? Can't see it.

I think the best way to do it would be to use little visual tricks to link the stories together, and trim the plots way back.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I'm not convinced either. I can see it being possible, but it's going to be tricky to pull off well.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Mehhhhhhhhhh something quite like this has already been done with Shortcuts, I'd say.

[andrewducker]

Looking at Short Cuts, it doesn't seem to have that kind of structure at all. It looks like it has a lot of different characters in different places, intersecting. Cloud Atlas has 6 different short stories - set from 1850 to the late 21st century, with no characters appearing in multiple stories.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Hmm, that is quite different. My mistake.

You might find Short Cuts interesting, though. It's based on quite a lot of different short stories by Raymond Carver, which have all been made to intersect.