Uh oh, Castaway Tom Hanks has confused Halle Berry’s head with a volleyball again.
In a long, excellent piece about Cloud Atlas from The New Yorker, author David Mitchell said, “As I was writing Cloud Atlas, I thought, it’s a shame this is unfilmable.” The piece goes on to explain in depth how directors Tom Tykwer and Lana and Andy Wachowski attempted to film the unfilmable. If the movie bombs, we’re going to pore over this piece again for the schadenfreude.
We recently described the first six minute trailer as a combination of four Oscar bait movies and two sci-fi ones. Now Warner has released the first official theatrical trailer, which looks awesome even if I still don’t know what’s going on. Comparisons to The Fountain are probably fair.
The synopsis for this 164 minute (!) film is, “An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.” That sounds ambitious as hell. Even if it ends up being a mess, we’ve got to give them props for attempting to film David Mitchell’s “unfilmable” Cloud Atlas. At least it’s not another damn “reboot”.
Cloud Atlas stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, Jim Broadbent, Xun Zhou, James D’Arcy, Doona Bae, and David Gyasi. The actors play multiple characters living in six time periods distanced by centuries.
We’re given a condensed preview of the six different time periods and stories including a Pacific Ocean voyage, an English musician in 1930s Belgium, a journalist in 1975 Buenas Yerbas, California, a present day London gangster story, a clone story in a future Korea and then finally, a post-apocalyptic Hawaii. [The Film Stage]
The film is going to premiere at Toronto International Film Festival this weekend and opens nationwide on October 26th, 2012. Check out the theatrical trailer below.
HD trailer available at Apple.