Cloud Atlas (2012)
- Eagle-eyed viewers have noticed a hidden easter egg referencing Lilly Wachowski, Lana Wachowski's previous film in the background of the opening scene.
- During the filming of Cloud Atlas, Tom Hanks improvised one of the most famous lines in the movie.
- The original script for Cloud Atlas was written over a decade before production finally began in 2012.
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 โ 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.
