An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.
Everything is connected: an 1849 diary of an ocean voyage across the Pacific, letters from a composer to his lover, a thriller about a conspiracy at a nuclear power plant, a farce about a publisher in a nursing home;, a rebellious clone in futuristic Korea, and the tale of a tribe living on post-apocalyptic Hawaii far in the future.Written by
Anonymous
The Wachowskis contributed $7 million of their own money to the film. See more »
Goofs
When Luisa Rey is run off of the bridge, the windshield and side window begin to crack in a spider web pattern. Car windshields are made from tempered safety glass. If and when a car window would start to fail, they instantly, completely shatter in to small squares. See more »
Quotes
[first lines]
Zachry:
[shivering beside the fire]
Oh, lonesome night. And babbits bawling, the wind biting the bone. Wind like this... full of voices. Ancestry howling at you, yibbering stories, all voices tied up into one. One voice differing. One voice, whispering out there, spying from the dark. The fangy devil, Old Georgie hisself. Mm. Now your ear up close, and I'll yarn you about the first time we met, eye to eye.
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Crazy Credits
The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer each had a full production crew for their respective stories. The end credits show this by rolling the Wachowskis' crew's credits on the left side of the screen and Tykwer's crew's credits on the right. See more »
There can be little doubt that Cloud Atlas will become a classic that will be watched over and over again by its devoted followers, just like its predecessors by Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott. Despite the many questions I had in my mind when I left the theater and the moments during the film when I felt disappointed or confused, I knew this, and I have not stopped thinking about the movie and longing to be back in front of the screen.
It is easy to criticize this movie as some have done for being overly ambitious, pandering to low taste, being too simple or too complex, with too few actors or too many, or even for celebrating revenge violence against professional critics who write negative reviews. They may all be correct, but these critics will still put themselves in the same category as those that warned audiences against 2001 or Blade Runner. The truth is that Cloud Atlas is profound in its reach, its visual and acoustic impact, its mesmerizing flow and its completely ground-breaking storytelling, and movie goers will see it and feel it in their guts.
It is a movie that is a product of our age of internet-driven universal knowledge and vision, and the freedom we have to travel the world and jump between ages, genres, images and identities at our will. It reminds us that we are human and that we can still hear our heart beat, if we listen.
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There can be little doubt that Cloud Atlas will become a classic that will be watched over and over again by its devoted followers, just like its predecessors by Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott. Despite the many questions I had in my mind when I left the theater and the moments during the film when I felt disappointed or confused, I knew this, and I have not stopped thinking about the movie and longing to be back in front of the screen.
It is easy to criticize this movie as some have done for being overly ambitious, pandering to low taste, being too simple or too complex, with too few actors or too many, or even for celebrating revenge violence against professional critics who write negative reviews. They may all be correct, but these critics will still put themselves in the same category as those that warned audiences against 2001 or Blade Runner. The truth is that Cloud Atlas is profound in its reach, its visual and acoustic impact, its mesmerizing flow and its completely ground-breaking storytelling, and movie goers will see it and feel it in their guts.
It is a movie that is a product of our age of internet-driven universal knowledge and vision, and the freedom we have to travel the world and jump between ages, genres, images and identities at our will. It reminds us that we are human and that we can still hear our heart beat, if we listen.