For as many smart, complicated and slightly trippy movies likely to emerge in this high-class fall movie season, none are likely to be as tricky as Cloud Atlas, the adaptation of David Mitchell's celebrated novel that doesn't even fit into a simple plot description. Directors Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer are charged with telling six stories, spanning many centuries, and all only loosely connected through the ideas that love and passion and morality unite people across long spans of time.
To get across that many characters and big ideas, Cloud Atlas first introduced itself to audiences with a massive six-minute trailer, which wowed even many of those who had no idea what the story was. But eventually the time would come for a more traditional, two-minute trailer, and we've got that one for you now, as the film prepares to make its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. You can watch it embedded below or in high-res at Apple.
It's impressive how many of the film's ideas they manage to fit into this much shorter time span-- by simply focusing on the idea that all of the film's characters are various resurrections of the same soul, slightly remembering each other throughout time, it sets up the notion that all these different stories are actually related, even if they look nothing alike. Mitchell's book didn't get too literal with the ideas of reincarnation of souls or anything like that, and I'll be interested to see if the Wachowskis and Tykwer go further with it. As we learned in the spectacular New Yorker piece this week, Mitchell highly approves of the movie, so any changes they made are presumably for the best.
We'll be learning a lot about Cloud Atlas after it premieres in Toronto this week, and everyone will finally have a chance to get a look at it when it opens October 26.
