Product Description
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From accled filmmakers Lana and Andy Wachowski, creators of
The Matrix Trilogy, and Tom Tykwer, director of Run Lola Run, the
powerful and inspiring sci-fi epic Cloud Atlas explores how the
actions and consequences of individual lives impact one another
throughout the past, the present and the future. Action, mystery
and romance weave dramatically through the story as one soul is
shaped from a killer into a hero, and a single act of kindness
ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution in the distant
future.
Extra Content
* A Film Like No Other--Three directors. Six stories across 800
years. Actors jumping through time, space and personality. How
did three visionaries of cinema divvy up the filmmaking to create
a coherent whole and how did this massive endeavour come to be?
.co.uk Review
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MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Everybody loves a trier--and Cloud
Atlas, Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski’s genre-hopping epic of
interlinking stories, is a deserving sci-fi contender that sets
its originality and complexity against the grain of risk-averse
Hollywood. The writers have heroically adapted David Mitchel’s
bestselling 2004 novel, condensing its 500 pages into three brisk
hours and d its famous chronology, in which successive
time periods are arranged concentrically like Russian dolls.
Instead, Cloud Atlas slides back and forth over its half-dozen
stories--Victorian travelogue, interwar romance, 70s corporate
thriller, bedroom farce, dystopian sci-fi and lyrical
post-apocalypse--interlocking them like an enormous cross-word
puzzle. As with the Wachowski’s Matrix trilogy, the overall plot
of Cloud Atlas is an earnest epic of metaphysical
freedom-fighting, and a daisy-chain of clues place the film’s
themes of slavery (whether personal, political or corporate) and
abolitionism as an eternal cycle in human history. Rejected by
Hollywood in early production, Cloud Atlas was rescued by $100m
of independent money and the good faith of its up-for-it
cast--who bust a gut to inhabit multiple roles, including
successive reincarnations of the same set of characters.
Artistically, it just aboutbreaks even as a sci-fi blockbuster:
staring its critics down and flaunting its eccentric touches.
These includes some out-there moments of race and gender
promiscuity: Hugh Grant switches between a playboy pensioner, a
Korean restaurateur and a grunting cannibal warlord; Hugo Weaving
plays the silver-tongued demon Ol’ Georgie whilst holding down a
side-role as Jim Broadbent’s bosomy matron; and Halle Berry is
both a feisty Blacksploitation-era journalist and a deracinated
English rose. Leading the cast is Tom Hanks, in the most generous
performance of his career--diving in and out of wigs, accents,
makeup and false teeth, exchanging dramatic leads for comic
bit-parts and revolutionary heroics for panto villainy. A box
office underachiever, Cloud Atlas is geared towards multiple
viewings, and offers a rare glimpse of a major literary
adaptation battling against production odds, and a cast and crew
uncynically giving their all. --Leo Batchelor /* Style
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