After watching this brand-new, beautiful and lengthy trailer for Cloud Atlas, you may find it a little easier to understand the new film from Andy & Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer-- but probably not by much. The sprawling, epic film is adapted from David Mitchell's novel, which tells six vaguely related stories that take place across an entire millennium of time, from a ship sailing the South Pacific in the mid-1800s to a primitive society in Hawaii that survived after the complete collapse of civilization way off into the future. You'll see both of those stories-- both of them starring Tom Hanks, as it turns out-- and many more in the trailer, which you can watch below or in glorious high-res at Apple. We'll talk more after.
As you can probably tell, all of the stars of the film are playing multiple roles, and some are so transformed by makeup that it's hard to even recognize them. For example, that's almost definitely Halle Berry standing there with Jim Broadbent in one scene, playing the wife of a classical Belgian composer in the 1930s-- and yeah, she's wearing a blond wig and contacts. And Jim Sturgess pops up in the futuristic section set in a country that's essentially South Korea-- there are some interesting racial issues with his role there, but we won't quite get into them now. And though you can't tell from this trailer, the role Tom Hanks plays in the story in the very far future-- where he's running around with Halle Berry-- involves speaking in some kind of garbled pidgin English, or at least it did in the book. We don't know if they'll maintain that for the movie or not, but suffice it to say that in all of these stories, there's more than meets the eye.
I loved Cloud Atlas when I read it earlier this year, and while it's still impossible to tell if the Wachowskis and Tykwer have pulled off this adaptation, the soaring score and minutely detailed visuals are at least a step in the right direction. Check back later for a full gallery of screenshots from this beautiful trailer, and look for Cloud Atlas in theaters on October 26.
