One Of The Decade's Highly Underrated Sci-Fi Movies Is Now On Netflix
Guess what? Cloud Atlas has come to Netflix. You've probably been waiting for this news since before you were born or after you died or since precisely right now. Maybe all of them. What's that you say? That claim makes no sense because the scenarios bear no resemblance to a rational concept of how time works? Some might say that makes it the perfect assertion to make in relation to Cloud Atlas because it kind of treats time like a snow globe instead of an hourglass, basically shaking around years and events and letting them fall haphazardly where they may.
Starring Halle Berry, Tom Hanks, and 172 minutes of "Huh?" Cloud Atlas can best be summed up as — um, huuuh. Let's let Roger Ebert explain it. In the words of the brilliant movie reviewer, "Any concrete, factual attempt to nail the film down to cold fact, to tell you what it 'means,' is as pointless as trying to build a clockwork orange." However, he also points out major themes and details.
In the film, six interweaving stories take place between the years 1849 and 2346, though they don't occur in chronological order. The actors play characters who look dramatically different across those scenes, having different ages, races, and genders, And there's a philosophical throughline that "all lives are connected by a thirst for freedom." However, not all viewers were connected by a hunger for nonlinear narratives.
Cloud Atlas didn't make it rain
According to the Guardian, Cloud Atlas leading man Tom Hanks told the New Yorker, "The script was not user-friendly. The demands it put upon the audience and everybody, the business risk, were off the scale." That risk was not rewarded at the box office, and the film flopped. Time Magazine contributor declared the Cloud Atlas the worst film of 2012, explaining, "The problem is there's no emotional hook in this bloated fantasia of special effects and makeup wizardry."
You might be thinking, "Hey! What's with all the negativity. Isn't Cloud Atlas one of the decade's highly underrated sci-fi movies?" Sure, why not? But honestly, the idea of a movie being underrated is silly on some level, unless people are lying about how they rated it. Otherwise, some viewers just rated it poorly, and others disagreed — like with probably every movie ever.
Although assessing how underrated this sci-fi film is probably involves more fiction than science, there are some who make the case that it got a raw deal from naysayers. Yay-sayer Alexander van Dulmen, the head of the European film distributor, A Company, implied that Americans are just too intellectually lazy to appreciate it, explaining, "Cloud Atlas has a more intellectual approach and the European audience is more open to movies where you have to think a bit." Roger Ebert thought a lot about it, writing, "Surely this is one of the most ambitious films ever made."