The movie the Wachowskis think they’ll be remembered for, and it’s not ‘The Matrix’
Most people who know the Wachowski sisters will think of their work on The Matrix first. The 1999 film revolutionised science fiction, blending martial arts, cyberpunk, and philosophy into a Hollywood blockbuster that spawned an entire subgenre. It remains the siblings’ most lauded and iconic work, especially as their later forays into filmmaking have proven to be increasingly polarising.
The most common complaint about the Wachowskis’ movies outside of the first Matrix film is that they put style over substance. Their work is often operatic in scale, reaching for visual heights that few other filmmakers have even attempted. 2015’s Jupiter Ascending, for example, is a dazzling spectacle taking place all over the cosmos, but its plot is utterly incoherent, its acting astonishingly overblown, and its dialogue laughably insincere.
“Incoherent” is a word that is often attached to the Wachowskis’ work, but according to the siblings, the one movie that they believe they’ll be remembered for is the one most often saddled with that word. Speaking to Buzzfeed in 2015, the filmmakers singled out their 2012 century-spanning philosophical epic, Cloud Atlas.
“Cloud Atlas will probably be the film that we’re remembered for because of, I think, the unique way it touches people,” Lana Wachowski said. “I mean, people, they like The Matrix — ‘Oh, it was cool’ — but it doesn’t necessarily change their lives. We get letters from people who have gone through life-changing decisions because of that film. And that was probably the hardest film to get made. It was just agony to get that film finally green-lit and to get the cash. I mean, in the end, we didn’t even get all the cash. Basically, we put in our own money to finally get over the last budget hurdle.”
At the time it was released, Cloud Atlas was one of the most expensive independent films ever made, costing somewhere between $100million and $146.7million. It was based on the supposedly unfilmable novel of the same name by David Mitchell, which follows a mishmash of genres, epochs, characters, and writing styles. It covers topics as disparate as Pacific slavery in the 19th century and a futuristic hellscape in Hawaii.
In the book, each plotline is split in half. The first half follows the stories in chronological order, and the second half follows the stories in reverse chronological order. If this sounds confusing, you can only imagine how challenging it must have been to adapt it into a movie. The Wachowskis and their co-director Tom Tykwer used stars including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Ben Whishaw, Susan Sarandon, and Hugo Weaving to play multiple characters across the various plots, highlighting the interconnectedness that the story preaches.
Many critics condemned the film for, not surprisingly, being incoherent. Several even named it the worst film of the year. But other critics hailed it as pure magic. Roger Ebert gave it a full four out of four stars, calling it, “Surely the most ambitious film ever made.”
Although it lost money at the box office, it made a tidy $130million and was one of the most talked about releases of 2012. As far as the Wachowskis are concerned, it’s found its audience, and it will only become more respected with time. Among its stalwart fans is one of its stars, Tom Hanks, who said that Cloud Atlas “altered [his] entire consciousness.”
