Andy and Lana Wachowski’s Co-directed film Cloud Atlas, based on the novel by David Mitchell, was released on October 26. The movie features an incredibly gifted cast featuring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, and Hugo Weaving as it follows six different storylines and six different lives and the struggles each face.

An abolitionist, an aspiring composer, a journalist, a publicist, an enslaved clone, and a tribesman are the main focuses of the movie. Each character faces a certain obstacle in their life, all pertaining to the lack of civil rights that are present in their time period. The plots take place in different eras, which include the 1850s, the 1930s, the 1970s, 2012, 2144, and a post-apocalyptic world. The main theme of the movie is that everyone is connected, and Cloud Atlas contains quotable lines relating to that theme such as “My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?”

Cloud Atlas has received mixed reviews, with some critics like Roger Ebert saying it was an amazing piece of art and a unique story with nothing quite like it. Others have said the movie was too confusing and pretentious, but the movie was not complicated at all if the viewer had an above average attention span. All in all, the movie was brilliant and it deserved much more attention than what it received.