Cloud Atlas. Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil

In the Chatham Islands, 1849, American lawyer Adam Ewing is waiting for his transport ship to be repaired. He witnesses the whipping of Autua, an enslaved Moriori man. In 1936, English composer Robert Frobisher finds work as an amanuensis to aging composer Vyvyan Ayrs, allowing Frobisher to compose his own masterpiece. In San Francisco, 1973, journalist Luisa Rey meets Sixsmith, now a nuclear physicist. Sixsmith tips off Rey to a conspiracy to create a catastrophe at a nuclear reactor. In London, 2012, gangster Dermot Hoggins murders a critic after a harsh review of his memoir, generating huge sales. Hoggins' brothers threaten the publisher, the aging Timothy Cavendish, for Hoggins' profits. In 2144, Sonmi-451 is a "fabricant", a humanoid clone indentured as a fast food server in a dystopian Neo Seoul. In 2321, the tribespeople of a post-apocalyptic Hawaii worship Sonmi, whose recorded testimony is the basis of their sacred text.

Scores like Cloud Atlas have an important and identifiable structure that relates directly to concepts in the film, intelligent and sophisticated application of thematic elements, and no small amount of beauty, harmony and excitement in the music itself. The “Opening Title” underscores part of what is, chronologically, the sixth piece, an action/sci-fi segment set 300 years into a post-apocalyptic future in which the human race has become a band of pidgin-speaking hunter-gatherers tormented by vicious hunting tribes, but whose fortunes change when they are visited by intellectual aliens looking for keys to their own past. It features a superb, enticing, almost hypnotic motif for guitar and harp, under which the first subliminal allusions to the Sextet appear on soft, undulating strings. The composers were Tom Tykwer, Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil.