I was recently fortunate enough to attend a showing of Cloud Atlas, the Wachowski siblings’ latest tour de force/Tom Hanks’ latest shameless Oscar grab. Now, I pride myself on being a harsh movie critic, which is why I’m not going to pull any punches here: Cloud Atlas was awesome, and I loved every minute of it. BAM! Tellin’ it like it is, folks; go cry about it if you think I’m being too mean.
Anyway, Cloud Atlas was a great watch that blended six seemingly disparate stories together into a single seamless narrative. Defying genre conventions and constantly leaping back and forth between sci-fi epic, historical narrative and farcical British comedy, among others, Cloud Atlas was a visual triumph on virtually every conceivable level. That said, I believe we can all agree that it did suffer from one glaring flaw: I didn’t write it.
Fortunately for the world, I had the foresight to scribble down the following script notes on a roll of toilet paper in the theater bathroom during the movie’s sixth hour. Here is the plot outline for my proposed sequel, Cloud Atlas 2: Attack of the Clones, which I eventually hope to sell to Disney for an obscene amount of tax-deductable charity money.
Side note: My tentative casting choice is to have Tom Hanks play every character, including the Asians.
CLOUD ATLAS 2: ATTACK OF THE CLOUD CLONES
by Ryan “The Third Wachowski” McAndrews
We open in 1 B.C., the first year ever, where CAVEMAN TOM HANKS is just beating the crap out of some dinosaurs. Seriously, just going to town on some pterodactyls or something. When he is not abusing extinct animals, CAVEMAN TOM HANKS makes a living by selling stone carvings depicting the events of his own life, which the other cavemen largely ignore in favor of the carvings of CAVEMAN RUSSELL CROWE. These carvings are later discovered by ...
ARCHEOLOGIST TOM HANKS, an 18th-century archeologist studying extinct animal abusers. He is married to SUSAN SARANDON but is secretly having an affair with his young Korean secretary, BAE DOONA; both roles will also be played by Hanks. ARCHEOLOGIST TOM HANKS keeps a diary of his growing marital troubles, a diary that is later read by...
ACTUAL TOM HANKS, the 2012 actor. I don’t actually have a plot idea for this portion of the film yet; I was just thinking we could kind of follow Tom Hanks around with a camera or something. When does the restraining order expire again? Note to self: Look that up when I get home.
ACTUAL TOM HANKS will end up leaving some kind of legacy behind (I’m thinking maybe he burns his name into the surface of the moon? Check CGI budget.) that is seen thousands of years later by ROBOCOP TOM HANKS, a police officer in a neo-dystopian city who is part-robot and part-cop and part-Hanks. Inspired by the far-reaching cinematic legacy of his predecessor, ROBOCOP TOM HANKS fights crime with the use of his charming personality, highly photogenic face and a talking cyborg dog named H.O.O.C.H. (voiced by Chris Rock or, failing that, Tom Hanks again).
Also, at some point, we’re going to put Hugo Weaving in a nurse’s outfit. I don’t care if we have to invent a whole new section of the movie just for that one thing. We are making that happen.
Ryan McAndrews is not an Oscar-winning screenwriter, but he is (supposedly) a journalism student at Ohio University and (kind of) a columnist at The Post. Send him your sci-fi-romance manuscripts at rm287608@ohiou.edu.
