An epic trailer for what looks to be an epic adaptation of David Mitchell’s award-winning novel, which, as Wikipedia puts it, “consists of six nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or observed) by the main character in the next. All stories but the last are interrupted at some moment, and after the sixth story concludes at the center of the book, the novel ‘goes back’ in time, ‘closing’ each story as the book progresses in terms of pages but regresses in terms of the historical period in which the action takes place. Eventually, readers end where they started, with Adam Ewing in the Pacific Ocean, circa 1850.”

Cloud Atlas, directed by Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski and featuring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, Jim Broadbent, James D’Arcy, and Doona Bae, will see its world premiere in Toronto.

Updates: In a “Director’s Commentary” posted at Apple, Tykwer and the Wachowskis talk about how this whole thing came together.

Thomas Jones, a contributor to the London Review of Books, didn’t like the book and thinks this trailer “makes the film look utterly terrible.”

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Tags: andy_wachowski, lana_wachowski, tom_tykwer