You should see CLOUD ATLAS this weekend for the following reasons:
1) Simply supporting this sort of bold large-budget bravery from Hollywood is important. That way we can see more of the sorts of movies we’re always saying that we want to see.
2) You’ll see choices and discoveries made by both the actors and adapters/directors that will alternately surprise and excite and inspire you in ways you hadn’t imagined these particular people could. Tom Hanks’ transformations, Hugo Weaving’s truly terrifying turn as Old Georgie, and everyone and everything that exists in between.
3) It’s just pure genius. It’s superb and spectacular and incredible and wondrous and truly unlike about anything you’ve ever seen before or will see again anytime soon. The very definition of “extraordinary.”
I’ve said it elsewhere, and I’m calling it now: CLOUD ATLAS is the Best Picture to not win Best Picture for 2012. What it does with storytelling, with performance, with visual effects, with finding and then uniquely expressing a thematic resonance that is at once intensely personal, immensely expansive, and fundamentally important… it’s just about the only film I’ve ever seen to live up to the unfair hype I had applied to it over months and months of ever-rising anticipation, and you can bet that I’ll be seeing it again as soon as possible. This weekend, I imagine. I hope.