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Critics Consensus: Its sprawling, ambitious blend of thought-provoking narrative and eye-catching visuals will prove too unwieldy for some, but the sheer size and scope of Cloud Atlas are all but impossible to ignore.
Critic Consensus: Its sprawling, ambitious blend of thought-provoking narrative and eye-catching visuals will prove too unwieldy for some, but the sheer size and scope of Cloud Atlas are all but impossible to ignore.
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All Critics (271) | Top Critics (52) | Fresh (178) | Rotten (93) | DVD (3)
[An] earnest but misbegotten adaptation, which reduces a moving tour de force to a dull and homiletic house of frenetically shuffled cards.
Whatever your age, even if life is an ocean made up of many drops, you may resolve that life is too short for this errant nonsense.
A film which piles on the action, the romance, the philosophical inquiry and the silly accents until the viewer is left punch-drunk and reeling. Seriously, what's not to love?
They key to successfully absorbing the movie may be in not trying to overthink what's on screen.
An eminently peculiar mismatch of substance and form, like a Hallmark card written by David Foster Wallace.
The result is maddening, exasperating, occasionally exhilarating -- and mostly boring.
It is a shame that the forecast for this Cloud-y dramatization could not have coherently pieced together its pocket of inherent dullness among the intermittent sci-fi splash-and-dash.
In many ways, the film is brilliant--maybe it's too brilliant. But in the midst of all this scope, I found it hard to completely invest.
The Wachowskis, for their part, were always born in the wrong decade, maybe that's what made the displaced timeline motif of Cloud Atlas so appealing to them.
It's a cold and distanced and, yes, rather boring experience during which we feel nothing for any of the characters. It is three hours without actually getting anywhere near the place it should have got to.
The most crowd-pleasing unfilmable novel ever made.
Let Cloud Atlas pour over you. It's an amazing achievement in visual story-telling, a fascinating and intelligent view of the future and among my favorite films of the year.
Endless uncomprehendible twaddle.
Super Reviewer
A misunderstood masterpiece.
Everything Is Connected. Good Movie! 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. Everything is connected: an 1849 diary of an ocean voyage across the Pacific; letters from a composer to his lover; a thriller about a murder 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 in post-apocalyptic Hawaii, far in the future.
The Wachowski brothers' sprawling epic tells the tales of a disparate collection of characters spread over centuries, from a murder plot on a 19th century slaving ship through to a post-apocalyptic far future. The many stories are told in parallel but share common themes and the leading actors play many different parts of different races and even gender thanks to some clever make up effects. The film weighs in at just under three hours and is very wordy, but maintains the attention as it is constantly flitting between the plots which may sound confusing, but they are so different in style and content it is actually quite easy to follow. It's not without its flaws; I found the future-speak and drawling accents of the Valley sequences incomprehensible and none of the stories have quite enough meat on them to become truly involving, especially considering the fact that we rarely stay with them for any real length of time. But Cloud Atlas is nothing if not ambitious and its originality and vision is to be commended in this era of production line, factory-farmed 12 certificate blockbusters.
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