( CNN ) -- Anyone who has complained that today 's movie industry lacks imagination , ambition and originality ( and who has n't ? ) had better take a look at `` Cloud Atlas . '' The new film from `` The Matrix '' siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski , and their co-conspirator Tom Tykwer ( `` Run Lola Run '' ) , spans centuries and continents , tells six separate stories and casts a dozen actors in three or more roles apiece . There is enough ambition and audacity here to fill an entire multiplex , astonishing spectacle and philosophical heft to match . It 's a bravura , rogue movie , the kind that has no business getting made . Does it work ? No , not really -- not for me -- but there is something truly wondrous about a folly on this scale . I 'll take it over another efficient cookie-cutter flick any day of the week . David Mitchell 's 2004 Booker-nominated novel begins midstream , well into what purports to be the diary of an innocent 19th century lawyer traveling the South Pacific in the company of unscrupulous mariners and brigands . In a kind of literary relay , this manuscript is devoured by a young apprentice composer in the 1930s , who comments on it in his letters to his male lover . Letters that turn up 40 years later when the lover -- a nuclear scientist -- is embroiled in a deadly corruption cover-up , which is the basis in turn for a pulp suspense novel read by a cranky British publisher , and so on and so forth -- all the way into the 23rd century and beyond . 'Cloud Atlas ' draws mixed reviews from TIFF . By most lights this would qualify as `` unfilmable '' ( it 's also brilliant - do read it ) , but apparently not . The movie adaptation is actually quite faithful , an honest and somewhat successful attempt to visualize Mitchell 's shifting epochs and recurring themes . It is more fragmented , though . Where Mitchell explores his stories in large , discreet chunks , the filmmakers have sliced and diced them into far shorter sequences , so that it 's not always clear which century we 're in or what 's going on , or why . The tactic is disorienting , but also distracts from how thin some of these stories actually are , once they have been boiled down to narrative essentials . Six tales in just under three hours -- that 's less than 30 minutes each , not long enough to delve beneath the surface . The novel plays with literary form and adopts a different authorial voice for each tale . The movie switches between costume drama to comedy to paranoia thriller to sci-fi fantasy , but seems flat in comparison . There 's not much momentum or suspense to keep the ship afloat , just a prevailing curiosity about how on earth everything connects . We 're invited to pick out correspondences and motifs across the years , from the comet-shaped birthmark that crops up several times to a haunting melody that outlives its composer , as well as wider patterns of prejudice , repression , resistance and rebellion . The movie 's politics are strikingly progressive and sophisticated . But the filmmakers ' reach often exceeds their grasp . Tom Hanks talks 'Cloud Atlas ' and more . What is exhilarating and impressive in the design is often undone in the detail . It makes some conceptual sense to cast the same actors in numerous roles -- it implies something about the human struggle and what one character calls `` perpetual recurrence '' -- but disguised and coated in layers of makeup , the stars ( they include Tom Hanks , Jim Broadbent , Halle Berry , Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw ) repeatedly default to crass caricature . The dramaturgy is frequently jarringly crude and ham-fisted ; frenzied comic relief fails to hit the mark ( Mitchell 's very dry , English sense of humor eludes them ) . There are fleeting moments of inspiration -- the Wachowskis are clearly in their element in the corporatized neo-Seoul of the not-so distant future -- but a post-apocalyptic episode where everyone speaks an incomprehensible invented pidgin cries out for cutting , and the earliest seafaring tale is also a very long haul . In short , `` Cloud Atlas '' is all over the map : an event movie with vision and brains , it 's also bombastic and ultimately enervating , getting lost in the fog of its own over-arching ambition .
`` Cloud Atlas '' is from `` The Matrix '' siblings Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer . The film stars Tom Hanks , Jim Broadbent , Halle Berry and Hugh Grant . It was released in the US on July 23rd 2007 to a very positive critical reception.