The movie Cloud Atlas (2012) is very much about reincarnation, karma, and the connections between immortal souls. These pantheistic underpinnings make it an interesting movie to dissect. All six of the storylines in the movie deal with freedom in some way— to free slaves, compose music, expose a scandal, write a novel, start a revolution, or leave this world. But for all of its talk of freedom, there is still an underlying message of bondage—karmic bondage…
I recently saw the movie Cloud Atlas (2012) starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry and based on the novel by David Mitchell. And I think the movie had a lot of people scratching their head. It did me. But I also thought its eastern thinking was very apparent. In the film, six interrelated stories are told that span nearly 500 years, from 1849 to 2321. Ten minutes in to the movie I gave up trying to figure out the connections between the stories and characters. And I’ve noticed that many reviewers gave up trying to give any explanation as to what the film means. As for me, on one level the film is a story of …
One movie which offered up somewhat of a critical evaluation of Eastern mysticism and the Daoist Way is the martial-arts fantasy epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) starring Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh. This film was directed by Tiawanese-born Ang Lee, filmed on location in China, based on a 1930s Chinese series of wuxia (martial hero genre) novels, and filled with an all-Asian cast. Movies with such credentials are usually unsuccessful in America, especially when they have subtitles or dubbing. But paradoxically, in America it became the highest-grossing foreign-language film in history.
