There are some movies you can just tell are going to split opinion right down the middle from a mile away, and it would be very fair to say that the Wachowski siblings and Tom Twyker’s ambitiously unwieldy Cloud Atlas was definitely one of them.
A trio of directors helming a sprawling centuries-spanning saga that reached from the 19th Century to the far-flung future based on source material that many found to be borderline pretentious and impenetrable was a monumental task, especially when the budget came in at a blockbuster-sized $140 million, with a 172-minute running time stretching audience patience to its limits, too.
In the end, Cloud Atlas did what many thought it was going to do on two fronts by bombing at the box office and splitting the opinions of critics and crowds right down the middle, but has the 10-year anniversary of the overwrought epic’s initial release increased its reputation at all? Well, that’s the debate happening on Reddit as we speak, and it looks as though we’re absolutely nowhere near reaching a unanimous consensus.
While the film remarkably boasts identical Rotten Tomatoes scores of 66 percent in terms of reviews and reactions, you don’t have to travel too far down the internet rabbit hole to find somebody who actively loathes Cloud Atlas with a passion.
In fact, many of them are commenting on the aforementioned thread, with the fantastical and visually stunning opus refusing to go down without a fight to decide whether or not its a misunderstood minor masterpiece, or an unrestrained ode to excess that saw the Wachowskis’ overly-ponderous nature get the better of them yet again.