Cloud Atlas Reviews
The Patriot Ledger
It's kind of fascinating to watch a vaunted Oscar quartet embarrass itself under the delusion that it's communicating something IMPORTANT!
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Daily Star
If you are going to baffle an audience for nearly three hours, you'd better make sure you have a damn good pay-off. But like the last two Matrix films, this peters out into embarrassing hippy drivel about reincarnation and cosmic interconnectedness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
Toledo Blade
Cloud Atlas ... is most likely to suffer by its own technological hand, as today's CGI effects become dated relics, and with a finale that doesn't so much reward audiences as it does offer them relief that their trial of patience is over.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
NECN
The Wachowskis' monumentally ambitious sci-fi time-hopper demands a superhuman level of dedication and patience but the payoff isn't worth the labor required to endure its nearly three-hour runtime.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
FilmDrunk
...like a three-hour, constantly shifting contradiction. You want to give it credit for all its dazzling imagery, but almost every actual idea it presents it eventually contradicts or leaves incomplete.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Schmoes Know
I was confused because I didn't know which story linked to which. Maybe I'm the dummy, but it felt like a mess. A sloppy soup that was good at first but became way too much to handle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Slant Magazine
Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski wanted to make a movie unlike any other, and they certainly did: Cloud Atlas is a unique and totally unparalleled disaster.
The Ooh Tray
What was ornate on the page becomes doggerel in translation.
Time Out Chicago
Basically a three-hour montage, Cloud Atlas neutralizes involvement in its dovetailing dramas by treating every character as a point in some quasi-spiritual game of connect-the-dots.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Christianity Today
It is hard to think of another film in recent memory in which the accumulation of so much talent has rendered so little.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
Scotsman
This must have sounded great at some point, but it's really terrible to watch.
The Washingtonian
A gorgeously shot package that blends the past, present, and future into diverse, lushly imagined realities that at least manage the task of feeling like they're from a single work. If only that work actually succeeded in fulfilling its lofty aspirations.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
Bullz-Eye.com
Unlike anything you've ever seen and probably ever will see again... [but] it's also bloated and incredibly self-indulgent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Las Vegas Weekly
There's so much flash and grandeur in Cloud Atlas that it's difficult at first to see how little substance is behind it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Metro Times (Detroit, MI)
Men play women. Women play men. Blacks play whites. An Asian plays a freckled Victorian. Bad accents flourish. And Hugo Weaving, whether he's a he, she, or ridiculous hoodoo leprechaun, is always the villain.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Top CriticThe movie doesn't really work, but it's fascinating in the ways it doesn't.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It plays like a gargantuan trailer for a movie still to be made (one that, given the same ratio, would be 86 hours long).
Little White Lies
The perfect film for all those people whose one, undying wish in life is to swim with dolphins.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
'Cloud Atlas' is like the entire 'Matrix' trilogy in micro. It starts out absolutely brilliantly, then segues into a pretentious slog.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Movie Chambers
Talk about your bad karma! Oh, lord. "Cloud Atlas" is probably the worst big-budget film so far in 2012.
Full Review
| Original Score: D+
