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Parents' Guide to

Cloud Atlas

By Jeffrey Anderson, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 16+

Enormous scale and spectacle, but weak characters, story.

Movie R 2012 172 minutes
Cloud Atlas Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

age 16+

Based on 15 parent reviews

age 18+

Unnecessary violence spoils mundane plot.

My wife and I walked out after 30 minutes. Way too much graphic violence that added nothing to the story. Depravity abounded. Storyline obtuse. We love Sci-Fi, but this film is Hollywood at its worst!!!

This title has:

Too much violence
Too much swearing
1 person found this helpful.
age 18+

Don't watch it--it's smut.

Do NOT let children or teens watch this film if you care about the purity of their minds, eyes, ears. GRAPHIC and awful!

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (15 ):
Kids say (13 ):

By normal standards, this is a disappointing movie, but it isn't an ordinary movie. If the six stories were disentangled and laid out separately, it would be clear that none of them has much depth or surprise. Cloud Atlas cuts corners to rush the multitude of shallow characters through their story arcs, which results in a general lack of rhythm. It becomes one long, monotonous thrum. What's more, the almost fetishistic use of makeup to distinguish the characters from the actors who play them is highly distracting, and the guessing game of who's behind which fake appendage becomes more interesting than the story itself.

But since Cloud Atlas is an "epic folly" (like David Lynch's Dune), many audiences will find themselves swept away and perhaps even enchanted by the movie's mere efforts to be huge and impressive. Throughout Hollywood history, size and scale have often triumphed over content, and, for many, the magnifying and inflating of these empty stories may make them seem resonant.

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