Trailer: Cloud Atlas

I've talked about the book Cloud Atlas before (and about my love of David Mitchell), and I think I may have mentioned how...leery I was when the film rights were optioned. This is a very intricate (VERY intricate) story told in the most beautifully frustrating way, and I didn't really see how anyone could try to bring it to film without making a muddle of it.
I still don't.

But now the nearly six-minute trailer has been released (six being a significant number in Cloud Atlas), and...I'm on the fence. In some ways, it really captures the book - the jarringly different styles, the atmospheres, the overall interconnectedness - but it still very much feels to me like there's no way to pull this off.

I intend to see it, for the fact that it's one of my all-time favorite books (and out of curiousity. And for Ben Wishaw, if nothing else), but I feel like this is either going to be the most stunningbreathtakingawe-inspiring thing ever, or spectacularly full of fail.

One of the two.

Check it out below and let me know what you think!

About the Book:
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Amazon | Audible | Goodreads
A little bit of everything... 509 pages
Published August 17th 2004 by Random House Publishing Group

A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’ s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us.