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Germany, United States, Hong Kong · 2012
Rated R · 2h 52m
Director Tom Tykwer, Lilly Wachowski, Lana Wachowski
Starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving
Genre Drama, Science Fiction
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A set of six stories spanning between the 19th century and the distant post-apocalyptic future. Cloud Atlas explores how the actions and consequences of individual lives impact one another throughout the past, the present, and the future, as an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.
A manifesto in the form of an enormously budgeted quasi-sci-fi epic, Cloud Atlas is evidently personal, defiantly sincere, totally lacking in self-awareness, and borderline offensive in its gleeful endorsement of revenge violence against anyone who gets in the way of a good person's self-actualization. The rest of the time, it's just insipid, TV-esque in its limited visual imagination, and dramatically incoherent.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
The cast comes off like a third-rate stock company on the matinee after the night on which everyone got bombed on mescal (and possibly mescaline).
Its ideas are paralleled, its themes twinned, sometimes breathlessly, sometimes fatuously, into what may be described as a 164-minute pop song of seemingly infinite verses, choruses, and bridges. Perhaps expectedly, it soars as often as it thuds.
Tom Hanks' appearances come across like scene changes between unfunny sketches on 'Saturday Night Live.'
Tykwer and the Wachowskis' other twist on this karmic hokum - to cast each of their actors in multiple roles across the stories, regardless of age or race - is less successful.
The Playlist by Kevin Jagernauth
Too long by at least a half hour, and both dull and repetitive as it goes on, Cloud Atlas reaches for envelope-pushing storytelling but never delivers on its promise.
Boxoffice Magazine by Mark Keizer
The movie version has the exciting and challenging parts down but the moral awakening it so strenuously wants us to experience remains beyond its reach.
Most viewers are likely to be impressed more by the magnitude of the effort than the magnificence of the effect. Cloud Atlas is a Terry Gilliam movie without the kinks, a Wong Kar-wai film without the smoky dreamscape, a time-and-Space Oddity that remains frustratingly earthbound. Put it another way: this is no "Speed Racer."
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