Spoiler Alert. I'm going to potentially give away too much information, so skip this if you plan to see the movie and don't want any surprises ruined.
The use of science fiction (a genre I very much like) for progressivism and liberalism is not new. When you consider that this genre attracts more than its fair share of imaginative people who envision worlds that are very different, worlds that have a tenuous relationship to reality, this shouldn't be much of a surprise.
The movie Cloud Atlas is in that border area between fantasy and sci-fi, its primary claim to sci-fi being the extension of the storyline into a dystopian future. Many social conservatives might object to its themes of reincarnation and New Agey interconnectedness. I personally find these interesting themes, and am generally intrigued by futuristic casts to spiritual journeys. This makes sci-fi interesting for me. Social conservatives may find Frank Herbert's explicitly religious Pandora Trilogy to be unacceptably blasphemous. I see it as an honest grappling with religious themes, whether or not I agree with his outlook.
But, in spite of finding Cloud Atlas to be an interesting movie, I think it is fundamentally a movie about promoting the values of contemporary Progressivism. A (deliberately?) confusing saga of reincarnated personalities over many lifetimes that have the metempsychosing souls perpetually reigniting their relationships, sometimes as heterosexual relationships, sometimes homosexual... And there is one dominant liberal trope that appears in the movie. The human story (in the movie) is one long civil rights journey that puts the following in the same boat: the recognition of blacks as people (something that, liberal agitprop aside, the Republican Party has always supported), recognition of homosexuality as normal and beautiful (gay is the new black), freeing senior citizens from a dehumanizing rest home, freeing the proletariat from the control of Evil Corporations (in the movie, Big Oil is targeted--that's a new one), freeing rural people from the limitations of their backwoods ignorant religious traditions.
