When Cloud Atlas opens today, many movies goers will have a lot to digest from the truly ambitious and epic film. At nearly a three hour running time, viewers are transported and transfixed to another parallel universe the filmmakers created. The movie stars Tom Hanks and Halle Berry as they play various characters whose lives intersect one another. The cast also includes Oscar winner Jim Broadbent (“Iris”), Hugo Weaving (“The Matrix”), Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, James D’Arcy, Xun Zhou, Keith David and David Gyasi, with Oscar® winner Susan Sarandon (“Dead Man Walking”) and Hugh Grant.
“The film is written for the screen and directed by Lana Wachowski & Tom Tykwer & Andy Wachowski. The Wachowskis previously teamed as writers/directors of the groundbreaking “Matrix” trilogy; Tom Tykwer won an Independent Spirit Award and earned a BAFTA Award nomination as the director/writer of “Run Lola Run,” and more recently directed the award-winning thriller “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.”Based on the celebrated best-selling novel by David Mitchell, “Cloud Atlas” is produced by two-time Oscar® nominee Grant Hill (“The Thin Red Line,” “The Tree of Life”), three-time BAFTA Award nominee Stefan Arndt (“The White Ribbon,” “Goodbye Lenin!,” “Run Lola2Run”), Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, and Andy Wachowski. Philip Lee, Uwe Schott and Wilson Qiu serve as executive producers, with co-producers Peter Lam, Tony Teo and Alexander van Dülmen, and Gigi Oeri as associate producer.
An ambitious and dazzling epic spanning five centuries, “Cloud Atlas” explores questions about life and purpose that humanity has contemplated since the beginning of conscious thought. With a kaleidoscopic array of action, emotion and urgent human connections that lights points along an infinite timeline, it suggests that individual lives continue their personal trajectories through the ages. Souls, reborn, renew their bonds with one another, time and again. Mistakes can be rectified…or repeated. Freedom can be gained or lost, but is forever sought.And always, love survives.