When it was first announced that someone was hoping to adapt David Mitchell’s award-winning, genre-hopping, millennia-spanning concertina of a novel for the big screen, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the people attempting such a feat were crazy. Well, crazy or not, the first images and a huge 5 minute trailer (embedded at bottom of post) of sorts for Cloud Atlas (2013) have now been revealed online.
Whether you have read the book or not, the concept is an intriguing one and the pictures will have done nothing but whet the appetite a little further. Written and directed by Tom Tykwer and Lana and Andy Wachowski, the film boasts an all star cast including – but not limited to – Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent.
The two different stories within the narrative that are represented by these tantalising first glimpses are that of a young English musician working for an ageing composer in Belgium in the 1930s (Ben Whishaw and Jim Broadbent) and one in a distant post-apocalyptic future where Hawaiian Zachry (Hanks?), meets a technologically-advanced foreigner, Meronym (Halle Berry).
Alongside these are tales of a newspaper man forcibly held in a retirement home, a young man en route back to America aboard a 19th century ship, a journalist investigating corporate corruption, and a clone who works in a fast food joint in future Korea. How exactly all of this, by way of the complex and at times confounding structure, will be condensed into Cloud Atlas’ limited runtime remains to be seen.
The full trailer is now available over at Apple and can also be watched below.
The Wachowski’s Cloud Atlas will premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival ahead of an October UK release (tbc).
Ben Nicholson
