Cloud Atlas suffers DOA opening weekend

This entry was posted 207 days ago

Cloud Atlas hasn’t exactly come out swinging during its first weekend Stateside. Unless we’re talking at the end of a rope. Arriving behind the growing popularity of Ben Affleck drama Argo and universally beloved animation Hotel Transylvania, it only recouped a meagre $9.4m of its largely independently-financed $100m budget.

The Wachowskis’ and Tom Tykwer’s latest mind-fuck (or brain-fart, depending on who you read) will have to garner some serious goodwill fast if it hopes to convince anyone that six roles for Tom Hanks in a single movie is a good thing. It’s already starting to resemble the beautiful corpse left by Darren Aronofsky’s similarly ambitious time-bender The Fountain, which failed to convince anyone that a chrome-domed Hugh Jackman floating around outer space was a good thing.

It would be futile to try and summarise the plot of Cloud Atlas. Adapted from David Mitchell’s popular 2004 novel, it deals with a huge cast of characters, interacting across different eras past, present and future. Suffice to say, the general theme -if it can be called that- is that old chestnut, ‘interconnectedness’.

It would be unfair to pre-judge Cloud Atlas on its mixed reviews and bad box-office (always such a reliable barometer of quality). But given that ‘interconnectedness’ is an incredibly vague and half-baked maxim often used to cloak what many would rather call a big fucking mess, not to mention the overstuffed trailer, Cloud Atlas has more than a whiff of Christmas turkey about it.

UK cinemagoers will have to wait until February to see what all the fuss isn’t about.