Cloud Atlas Movie Review

As a film critic I would love to have the luxury of seeing every new film and writing about it. As this is not a paying job for me, I have to pick and choose what I see, mostly based on personal preference, but often choosing films that are popular or important benchmarks. The subject matter of Cloud Atlas hardly interested me, although the filmmakers involved certainly did. The Wachowski siblings, Andy and Lana (formerly Larry) brought us The Matrix trilogy, the first installment of which I think is filled with wonderful vision, a great story, and brilliant use of visual effects. I found Tom Tykwer deeply intriguing as a filmmaker with both Run, Lola, Run and The Princess and the Warrior, although admittedly I know nothing of his work in the past decade. Together these three directors decided to bring David Mitchell’s complicated 2004 novel which involves six stories in different time periods and characters that exist as alternate versions of themselves across time and space.

The Way Back Movie Review

“Based on the book” is a phrase sometimes applied loosely to films. “Inspired by” is a somewhat more accurate albeit much more imprecise expression of the basis for source material. Still more liberally invoked in cinema is “based on a true story.” In Peter Weir’s The Way Back we have a film that is very loosely based on the book The Long Walk, purportedly presenting a true story, the veracity of which has been called into doubt on several occasions.

None of that should really matter because when we watch a film we should be judging it on its own merits and not on whether it’s similar to the book or not, or if it’s a true story. But the problem is that presenting your film up front as being based in fact tends to color the audience’s judgment of the events depicted.