by DAVID WALSH
Written and directed by Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, based on the novel by David Mitchell
German director Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, Heaven) and Andy and Lana Wachowski, responsible for the Matrix films, have teamed up to adapt David Mitchell’s 2004 novel, Cloud Atlas, for the screen.
Both the book and film are composed of six stories, set in very different times and places.
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The author seems intrigued by various Nietzschean and postmodern conceptions. Like Nietzsche (more explicitly present in the novel), Mitchell is uninterested in actual history or historical law and prefers his own semi-mythological reading of humanity’s past (and future). For Nietzsche, who propagated the notion of the “eternal return,” history was circular, if not merely a construction serving the immediate needs of “life.” Along with a fascination with infinite “recurrence,” the German philosopher’s musings about the “will to power” find a prominent place in Mitchell’s work.
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