Skip to main content

Lost in the Nuclear Clouds

I watched Cloud Atlas (2012) over the last two nights (it’s almost 3 hours long) and was surprised that one plotline involves a nuclear energy facility, at least tangentially.

If you haven’t seen the movie, it tells six distinct stories in widely variant time periods, each in its own style. Like D.W. Griffith’s similarly structured Intolerance (1916), its stories are built around a common theme – in the case of Cloud Atlas, the interconnectedness of everyone through eternity.

To bring this point home, many of the actors play roles in all six stories, crossing gender, racial and ethnic lines. This is different than the David Mitchell novel the movie is based on, which doesn’t suggest the characters reincarnate; the novel also tells the six stories sequentially while the movie intercuts them, sometimes in very quick shots, to make the theme and the connections clearer.

All this sounds tricky, even gimmicky, but the filmmakers (the Wachowski siblings and Tom Tykwer) work very hard to keep the stories coherent. The nuclear plant story, put together by Tykwer, is probably the most coherent because it uses the familiar framework of a 70s paranoid thriller (think The Parallax View (1973) or Klute (1970)) to tell of a reporter (Halle Berry) who uncovers a vast conspiracy that involves the purposeful sabotage of a new nuclear facility.

When I broke at the ninety minute mark the first night, this section played like the mutant spawn of The China Syndrome (1979)and Silkwood  (1982). I didn’t expect the second half to go well, especially after the intrepid heroine’s car is forced to plummet into a lake by a shadowy assassin (Hugo Weaving) employed by the shadowy nuclear plant.

Let’s pause and expand on the idea of nuclear energy as a villainous force. There’s no particular reason to get exercised by movie ideas like atomic twisters or evil energy executives having likeable young people killed. Movies, especially thrillers and other genre movies, don’t particularly care if their treatment of a subject lacks objectivity or accuracy; audiences understand this because they quite reasonably want action and thrills, not an essay on the perils or benefits of nuclear energy. The villain is a villain – just give him or her silky diction, darkly ridiculous motivations and enough henchmen to get their shadowy cabal union cards. Then, let the mayhem commence.

But – resuming our review of the story -

Cloud Atlas did not choose nuclear energy as its viper du jour. Quite the opposite. <Note: spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen the movie, stop reading now>.

An army friend (Keith David) of Berry’s deceased father (who was also a journalist) enters the story and reveals to Berry (she survives her trip into the water; surprised?) that the evil spider den is actually  occupied by disgruntled gas and oil executives who want nuclear power to fail because “it is the energy of the future.” These executives, led by a rotted looking Hugh Grant, are afraid of being rendered irrelevant. You could have knocked me over with a fuel rod at that revelation, but there it is.

Cloud Atlas is meant to be taken fairly seriously while delivering a load of entertainment and a fortune cookie moral. I’m not underestimating the filmmakers’ desire to have of fun with the premise – they know that the movie’s busy narrative agenda is almost a parody of ambition, so why not add a little fun?

Tykwer achieves this by setting the nuclear/oil segment in the 70s and evoking the style of that period by aping the moviemaking techniques and ideas of the time. But the titles it is referencing were interesting, well-done thrillers, not fat slabs of cheese. Even The China Syndrome is genuinely suspenseful if fantastically mendacious. The decision to take this approach, which occasionally turns Halle Berry into Pam Grier’s karate chopping Foxy Brown, makes the irresponsibility of the segment really glare. Just because the nuclear energy industry is absolved of wrongdoing (whew!) and given a shout out doesn’t make the conceit less problematic.

So, the segment’s not free of problems, but it isn’t the second coming of The China Syndrome, either. is Cloud Atlas a good movie overall? Well, the comparison to Intolerance remains apt: like its 95 year old precursor, it’s big, often silly when it means to be serious and the treatment of the theme is very, very blunt.

But it is also gigantic in scope, shot through with narrative if not thematic ambition and extremely well performed (the actors in all their roles are fascinating to watch – some of it feels genuinely transgressive, especially in light of the Larry-to-Lana Wachowski transition). It is, like many recent movies, an audio-visual experience rather than an affecting piece of work. You may come out of it feeling pummeled by the propulsion of its imagery, but at least not too annoyed at the filmmakers for their rather cavalier treatment of the atom.

---

With the opening of Pandora’s Promise Friday, let’s consider this movie week at NEI Nuclear Notes.

Comments

Cloud Atlas was one of my favorite films in 2012.

But it doesn't take a Sci Fi movie to tell you that the fossil fuel industry has always viewed the nuclear power industry as a long term threat to their trillions of dollars of investment in coal, gas, and oil.

Marcel F. Williams

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should