Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Cloud Atlas, Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You...
The writers of RR&RS are all big fans of David Mitchell. Personally, i'm always a bit ambivalent about movie adaptations of novels, especially novels as reliant upon the prose voice of someone as dynamic as Mitchell. But the trailer for Cloud Atlas - produced by the Wachowskis (the creators of The Matrix) and directed by Tom Tykwer (the writer/director of the fantastic Run Lola Run) - looks fantastic:
Damn was that exciting! Cloud Atlas seems like an unfilmable book, but this preview certainly looks like it might have pulled off the trick. And those special effects are incredible. I've found the Wachowski's movies post-Matrix to be visually stunning but emotionally disengaging, so I hope that Tykwer found a way to stay true to the story while allowing for all of this visual drama.
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The trailer suggests - and it is hard to trust trailers - that they treat each story as real, simply taking place at a different moment in time on Earth.
ReplyDeleteSo, it is quite possible that certain, important, aspects of the book will be lost - but it also looks like they nevertheless may have figured out how to make an exciting movie from the book.
I'm curious if they'll stay true to the Mitchell's nested structure in telling these stories, or if they'll cut back and forth between stories at will.
From the official website:
ReplyDelete"Cloud Atlas explores how the actions and consequences of individual lives impact one another throughout the past, the present and the future. Action, mystery and romance weave dramatically through the story as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero and a single act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution in the distant future."
Oh, well.
There's an article on the making of the movie in this week's New Yorker. Though its more just a story about the Wachowskis. You can read it online:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/10/120910fa_fact_hemon
More news! Zach Beauchamp writes very articulately about the challenges the Wachowskis face in putting the book to film on Think Progress: http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/09/06/808361/can-cloud-atlas-put-the-human-in-the-machine/
ReplyDeleteI think that regardless of if the film is a success or not, it's going to be something different. IMO, ambitious failures are always more interesting than bland adaptations.