When is cloud atlas out

Note: to avoid confusion we will mostly refer to the characters by the names of the actors who play them. His soul journey: He starts off reluctantly helping one slave to becoming an abolitionist and ultimately becomes a revolutionary dedicated to ending all slavery. His soul journey: He starts off by being pompous and self-serving but learns humility over time. Her soul journey: She goes from being a powerless figure to a goddess revered by a simple tribe, the only link they have to their pre-apocalyptic past.

HUGH GRANT Who he plays: A reverend and a plantation owner in ; a hotel clerk trying to collect from Ben Whishaw; the owner of a nuclear power plant in who wants it to fail and kill millions; the cuckolded brother of Jim Broadbent who tricks him into committing himself to a nursing home; a Korean restaurant manager in who sleeps with his clone workers; the leader of a band of cannibal warriors in His soul journey: Despite a charming exterior at first, he never really cares about anyone, and this only gets worse over time; he devolves into a pure savage.

His soul journey: A little muddled. In all those years, Portman was promised the role of Sonmi, but had to turn down the role at the last minute after becoming pregnant in ; however, she is given a special thanks in the closing credits.

That strike took place eight years later in during the Reagan administration. Quotes Sonmi : Our lives are not our own. Crazy credits When a montage is shown of all the characters the actors play, the font of the names changes with each time period. User reviews 1K Review. Top review. Daring and quite impressive. That's the best description I could come up with after being asked by my brother and sister-in-law about my thoughts on Cloud Atlas immediately following the film's second-ever public screening we'd just attended.

Not a very incisive assessment, I'll grant you, but my head was still spinning as I tried to make sense of what I'd just witnessed over the film's jam-packed two hour and forty three minute running time.

This may be one the most ambitious and epic films I've ever seen, demanding rapt attention from viewers as they're taken on an odyssey that spans the globe over years and hopscotches between numerous interwoven story lines that incorporates just about every film genre available, featuring actors playing several different roles each.

The Wachowskis, notoriously press shy, were surprisingly on hand along with Tykwer to introduce the film's second screening the morning after its star-studded TIFF world premiere on September 8th at the Princess of Wales Theatre. A movie this expansive should have a massive cast, considering how many characters appear - not so in this case, though.

Having so many dimensions to explore with all of their characters must have been acting nirvana for this lot. For the most part, they pull off the various requirements of the roles, many of which require a significant amount of prosthetics and makeup. Several of the roles were so well disguised that I was completely clueless that a certain actor had played the role until the end credits visually made some of the big reveals learning that Berry played the white Victorian housewife and Grant a war paint-layered native completely floored me.

Sticking around until the end is an absolute necessity for Cloud Atlas - the oohs and ahhs from the sold-out audience as they discovered who actually played some of the parts was a wonderfully unique filmgoing experience for me. For all of the positive aspects that the race bending and gender bending idea brings to the film, there is the faint whiff of novelty attached to it.

Things do get a little silly when you have Weaving seemingly playing an Asian character whose makeup produces more of a Vulcan look which may have been intentional, as it's for a sci-fi sequence that takes place somewhere in the s , as well as in full drag playing a Nurse Ratched-like character.

The latter obviously has parallels to Lana Wachowski's own life and although the nurse character provides some decent laughs, I was a little hung up on how it seemed one of the character's main functions was to generate laughs purely based on the surreal sight of Weaving playing one truly ugly looking woman.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it. Weaving does provide one of Cloud Atlas' most memorable roles, as the seriously creepy Old Georgie, who terrorizes one of Hanks' many characters. Hanks does some of the best work I've ever seen from him, playing four different characters that range from an unscrupulous doctor in the s to going far against type with maybe the film's standout character, a modern-day thuggish British writer named Dermot Hoggins who gets the ultimate revenge on a critic for a bad review.

Berry is excellent with her predominant roles playing an ambitious reporter in s San Francisco and a political figurehead from what I could grasp aligned with one of Hanks' characters in the far future, in one of the film's few story lines that doesn't quite work.

Also great is Broadbent as both a composer and playing a man tricked into living in a retirement home, who provides the film's best comic relief. The weighty Cloud Atlas principle themes of philosophy, reincarnation, oppression, and destiny, along with the film's highly challenging pace and complex non-linear storytelling construct will overwhelm many - that's okay, however.

I was lost a number of times - not Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy-level lost, mind you, but definitely out of sync with what was happening on screen. This is the type of daring film that demands multiple viewings to completely grasp the filmmakers' grand scope and there's nothing wrong with a little audaciousness from Hollywood once in a while.

Even with a big-name cast, it'll be very interesting to see how the otherwise difficult-to-market Cloud Atlas will fare at the box office come late October. MediaboyMusings Sep 25, FAQ 3. Is "Cloud Atlas" based on a book? I could tell you that, and what help is it? I could tell you that each segment is a refashioning of the story contained in the previous one.

That the same birthmark turns up in every period of time. That a repeated motif is that all lives are connected by a thirst for freedom. That the movie was inspired by the much-loved novel of the same name by David Mitchell. That in the novel, the stories were told in chronological order, and then circled back again from end to beginning.

That the movie finds its connections through the reappearances of the same actors in different roles and deliberately refers to one story from within another.

Now are you wiser? I'm treading water. And now could follow a very long paragraph introducing and describing the different characters played by the actors. But you would lose your way all the same, because many of the performances and disguises are so cunningly effective.

I could tell you that Halle Berry's work as a mids investigative reporter works well for me, and the gnarly wisdom of Tom Hanks as an old man telling tales is the most impenetrable.

I despair. I think you will want to see this daring and visionary film, directed by Lana Wachowski , Tom Tykwer and Andy Wachowski. Anywhere you go where movie people gather, it will be discussed. Deep theories will be proposed. Someone will say, "I don't know what in the hell I saw. And now you expect me to unwrap the mystery from the enigma and present you with a nice shiny riddle? Sometimes the key to one movie can be suggested by another one.

We know that the title refers to early drawings of the shapes and behavior of clouds. Not long ago I saw a Swedish film, " Simon and the Oaks ," about a day-dreaming boy who formed a bond with an oak tree. In its limbs, he would lie reading books of imagination and then allow his eyes to rest on the clouds overhead.

As he read a book about desert wanderers, the clouds seemed to take shape as a ghostly caravan of camels in procession across the sky.