Taking shape from the heavens is CLOUD ATLAS, Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski’s adaptation of David Mitchell’s sprawling multi-narrative tome. Last we heard about the project, Hugo Weaving was fawning over how and fellow cast mates get to play multiple roles in the film (he’ll play six different parts himself). Well, it looks like the film has been given a legitimate release date.
CLOUD ATLAS will roll into theaters October of next year. No specific date has been slotted, but it’s a sure shift from the previously reported May 2012 release frame.
Starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry (below), Jim Broadbent, Susan Sarandon, Hugo Weaving, Ben Winshaw and possibly Ian McKellan and James McAvoy – CLOUD ATLAS consists of six nested stories that take us 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 watched) by the main character in the next. All stories but the last one get 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.