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Starring Tom Hanks & featuring Mallorca, Cloud Atlas premieres in Europe today
Look out for the sweeping opening shot in the Torrent de Pareis
Cloud Atlas, the film shot partly in Mallorca, directed by the Wachowski siblings of the Matrix Trilogy and German director Tom Twyker (Run Lola Run), opens today in cinemas across the UK and Europe.
The film is an adaptation of the book by David Mitchell and tells six stories that span several thousand years. The stories are connected by the ideas of love, hope and sacrifice and are held together by having the same actors play different characters across the millennia. So Tom Hanks appears as a nefarious ship's surgeon in 1849, a nuclear scientist in 1973, a violent Irish author in 2012 and a pidgin speaking hunter-gatherer in a post apocalyptic 2321. The cast also includes Halle Berry, “New Q” Ben Wishaw, Hugh Grant and Jim Broadbent and part of the fun of the film is spotting these actors as they change time, race and gender.
Two of the stories, the chronological bookends of 1849 and 2321, were shot in Mallorca using the Tramuntana Mountains and the beach of Sa Colobra to create a Hawaii of the future and the South Pacific of the 19th Century and unsurprisingly, Mallorca looks great. An opening tracking shot down to the waterline at Sa Colobra shows off the uniqueness of the beach and the beauty of the mountains that surround it. The latter stages of the film see Hanks and Berry trekking over the Tramuntana will surely dispel any notions people may have of Mallorca as just a beach resort.
Cloud Atlas is long and can be confusing but, despite it's darker moments, it is a rewarding film and ultimately an uplifting celebration of human potential. Fans of Mallorca and of films like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and especially “The Fountain” will certainly enjoy the film. It is thought provoking and intelligent, and surely any film that features Hugh Grant as a tattooed cannibal has to be worth a watch?
