Utopia in Dystopia: Cloud Atlas

Sf movies, together with war and horror films, are interesting indicators of what culturally and politically goes on in a society. The 9/11 attacks of 2001 striking New York and Washington have generated a great number of cultural responses from Hollywood. While realist movies initially replicated the event without offering an analysis of it, such as United 93 (Greengrass US/UK/France 2006) and World Trade Center (Stone US 2006), and later focused on the psychological consequences of the event, as in Reign Over Me (Binder US 2007) or Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Daldry US 2011), sf films in particular dealt with the attack obliquely, turning – more often than not – to post-apocalyptic scenarios and atmospheres, as in War of the Worlds (Spielberg US 2005) and Cloverfield (Reeves US 2008). Among sf films, Cloud Atlas (Wachowski siblings and Tykwer Germany/US/HK/Singapore 2012), adapted from David Mitchell’s novel of the same title, stands out as a significant visionary tour-de-force.