Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: July 26, 2012
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Cloud Atlas movie trailer #1
Movie trailers, while initiating in movie theaters — and now, more accurately, on the internet — do make their way to television sooner or later. It’s fairly impossible to date when a trailer first trickles down to TV spots; it’s much easier to mark a trailer’s online “debut.” So this is how I’m justifying using this space to talk about the Cloud Atlas trailer. Because we don’t have a recurring feature here at Decider called “Today in Movie Trailer History.” Maybe we should? Though, honestly, the Cloud Atlas trailer essentially makes nearly every other trailer that came before or after it wholly irrelevant. It’s the apex of the artform.
This, by the way, is a completely separate argument from assessing the quality of Cloud Atlas itself, a film that I personally find rather wonderful in all its jaggedness, but which I can fully understand would be much too much for some audiences. It is perhaps a movie that functions even better in trailer form, especially in the five-and-a-half-minute format that this particular trailer takes. The marketers behind this particular campaign knew that the target format for movie trailers was no longer the theater but the laptop and the smartphone, which means the old strictures of the two-and-a-half-minute trailer no longer applied. Which is a good thing, because Cloud Atlas needed a lot of time to get explained.
Based on the David Mitchell novel, Cloud Atlas told a story spanning six different time periods, with the same handful of actors (including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Ben Whishaw, and Jim Broadbent) playing multiple characters of various nationalities and races. Making use of the extended running time, the trailer eases the viewer in with Whishaw’s sweet face and comforting voice-over. Whishaw’s a good anchor, because before long, we’re plunged head-first into the film’s often confounding casting decisions. Tom Hanks as a nerdy scientist, or even a futuristic hill person? Fine. Tom Hanks with a weird beard playing a London thug? Well …
Whishaw’s voiceover gives way to Jim Broadbent’s, which then gives way toHanks, which then gives way to Susan Sarandon’s breathy Earth-mother tones. The characters passing the baton throughout the film’s timelines.
And then there’s the music. The score from the film covers the first two-thirds of the trailer, a sweet, moving piece of orchestral work co-written by the film’s co-director Tom Tykwer. But everything breaks wide open at the 3:15 mark, when the Cloud Atlas trailer goes from a good piece of marketing for a challenging movie to a destination in and of itself. The instrumental crescendo to M83’s “Outro” has been used a LOT in montages and as a backing track for advertisements and promos. But it reached its absolute apex as the Cloud Atlas trailer exploded into a thrilling climax. All of a sudden, the storylines of the preceding four minutes start to crash into one another. Thank God you decided to binge this entire trailer all at once to avoid getting spoiled. Louisa Rey’s car hitting the water. The waitresses at Papa Songs. “You savin’ me twice’in.” The drum crescendo at 4:19. Hugo Weaving’s deep-voiced racism. Exploding planes! Sarandon in a caftan with a glass of wine! The drum crescendo at 4:48! An exploding china shop! A slave-ship escape! With the rapid-fire all-caps of the film’s themes getting literally thrown in your face — BIRTH! LIFE DEATH! PAST! PRESENT! FUTURE! — the all-encompassing bigness of the Wachowskis’ vision was communicated in this most concise of formats.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that once you have seen the movie, revisiting the trailer is an even more emotionally satisfying experience. That china-shop scene alone brings a reliable tear to my eye every time.
Don’t ever let them tell you trailers can’t be art on their own, because they can, because this was.
[You can stream Cloud Atlas on Amazon Video.]
