Friday, November 18, 2016

Cloud Atlas

Anyone can tell from the length that Cloud Atlas is a great movie.

It was my first time watching the movie and I have to say the structure of the movie is quite unique. Multiple stories are presented in "random" order and together they form a blueprint of what the author tries to deliver to the readers. I spent the first quarter trying to understand what is going on and what are the relationships among the 6 stories. But bearing with the confusion, each story was very attractive on their own. I was so curious to find out how they proceeded. At the end of the movie I was glad that the sub-stories are finally linked together as a magnificent world of imagination. Prof mentioned that he got many ideas about life from Cloud Atlas but during my first trial I was struggled with the content so I could not fully understand the meaning underneath the stories. From my points of view, the movie was trying to tell us, in your way towards your dream, there will always be obstacles and oppression, and scarification must be made to do what need to be done in order to overcome them.

Among all the lines, there is one that really shocked me. "All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention, if only one can first conceive of doing so." It was how I saw the world at the age around 14. At that time I was thinking, why there must be rules, especially those unreasonable ones, to prevent people from doing what might be more beneficial to the world? I was quite upset about it at that time. But after I grow up a bit I then somehow find the rules acceptable because there are too many people in the world and they all think differently so without rules the world might become a place of chaos. So I started wondering, what are the rules that is of no value to follow and what are the ones that I need to stick with even though I don't like them? Apparently I do not have the wisdom to tell the difference between this two so far because I am still confused about it. My doubt is actually similar to a philosophy concept of in 西游记, Journey to the West, where Zhu Bajie was named Wuneng (悟能) because he needs to learn what can be done and what cannot be done. I guess I still have a long way to go before I can clarify the question.

Back to Cloud Atlas, after some research I realised that there were some difference between the movie and the book. So I would like to read the book during winter vacation and hopefully this time I can focus more on the connotation.


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