Cloud Atlas - Six different stories, in different eras, all connected yet not connected and spread over 500 years. Each story made in distinctly different styles. All chopped up so you rarely spend more than 5 minutes in any one story before it cuts back or forward in time to another of the six stories.
Tom Hanks, a greedy 19th Century quack doctor, plays Jim Broadbent (kind of). Broadbent is a 62 year old book publisher escaping from a nursing home in 2012 and also an aging composer married to Halle Berry in 1936. Berry is of course also investigating power plant boss Hugh Grant in 1973 and reads the love letters that Ben Whishaw sent to his gay lover, and 22nd Century Rebel Commander, in the 1930's. Whishaw is also Hugh Grant's wife in 2012 with whom he negotiates a slavery deal in 1849 at the behest of Hugo Weaving.
Hugh Grant, it should be mentioned, is a murderous 24th Century cannibalistic tribal chief who gets in a bit of a to-do with Tom Hanks who worships a 22nd Century clone who is also Hugo Weaving's daughter in 1849. Hugo Weaving incidentally is some kind of devil, a female nurse in 2012 and hired assassin in 1973.
Ambitious, exciting, perplexing and touching. Loved it.
