Cloud Atlas arrives in theaters on the 26^th of October following its highly anticipated premiere at TIFF 2012. The premiere was celebrated with a 10 minute standing ovation from the audience – unusual even for TIFF. It took six years and $100 million dollars of independent financing to get Cloud Atlas into production. It is the brainchild of David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas the 2004 novel. The screenplay is written by Lana Wachowski and directed by three critically acclaimed directors: the creators of the Matrix Trilogy, Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer, Run, Lola, Run! Add to this an all-star cast of characters in a story that crosses time boundaries reaching back to the 1800’s and forward across the millennium. It intertwines a series of lives and souls in an intricate web of separate interrelated stories with a single unifying thread.

Cloud Atlas is an epic sci-fi/fantasy adventure-drama, a story form that rarely comes to the theatre unless accompanied by super heroes not just everyday people. That is what makes Cloud Atlas different. It certainly helps that the ‘everyday people’ are some of the biggest screen stars today including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Ben Wishaw and Jim Broadbent.

Cloud Atlas is a tale of the interconnectedness of humans and their actions. Death, life, birth, love, hope, courage, the wheel of life and the concepts of nirvana and karma are really at the root of this film. Visually the movie is superb employing a number of cinematic techniques to transport the viewer across time. The story requires the full attention of the viewer. There are no simple plot lines. Each character is on a quest and has a mission. How they accomplish this will have impacts that will influence generations to come. We will meet people in the future who are now experiencing the impact of those actions. We are introduced to the essence of these quests at the beginning of the movie through a series of letters some of which are missing and a book – half of which has been lost. We also discover that although each story is set in a very different time period for various reasons there is a deep connection between the characters. They are identified across the millennium by a common birthmark and in fact they are reincarnations of themselves, the same souls travelling forward through time.