Cloud Atlas (2012)

Most people think so. 77% of audiences gave it a thumbs up, by Google's archived audience score. Critics gave it 60%.

A set of six nested stories spanning time between the 19th century and a distant post-apocalyptic future. 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 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. Based on the award winning novel by David Mitchell. Directed by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis. Wikipedia ↗

Cloud Atlas is a 2012 epic science fiction film directed by Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, and Andy Wachowski, based on David Mitchell's 2004 novel. The film interweaves six interconnected stories spanning from 1849 to a post-apocalyptic far future: a 19th-century lawyer befriending a slave on a Pacific voyage, a 1930s musician composing his masterpiece, a 1973 journalist investigating a nuclear conspiracy, a present-day publisher trapped in a nursing home, a 2144 clone discovering rebellion, and a post-fall tribesman encountering advanced civilization. Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, and others played multiple roles across the six timelines, sometimes crossing racial and gender lines through extensive prosthetic makeup.

Cloud Atlas was one of the most ambitious and divisive films of its decade — its defenders called it a profound meditation on how individual acts of kindness ripple across time and how the same souls keep finding each other across lifetimes, while its detractors found the narrative unwieldy and the cross-racial makeup distracting. Made for $102 million, the most expensive independent film at that time, Cloud Atlas earned $130 million worldwide.