Trailer Analysis - Cloud Atlas

This video is the extended trailer for 'Cloud Atlas' (Tom Tykwer, 2012), one of my favourite films of recent years, largely unseen by most people and in my opinion greatly underrated. Based on the book by David Mitchell, 'Cloud Atlas' follows multiple plot-lines spanning across six different eras, from a lawyer travelling across the sea to colonial America to a worker clone escaping from 'Neo-Seoul' hundred years in the future. These stories are told concurrently; linked together literally, thematically, metaphysically. 

Clearly, this presents a challenge for the structure and editing of the film, and makes for an interesting case study. Each story has its own time-line and 3-act narrative which are wildly different and involve a range of characters, and so to translate this into a coherent story within the limited time-span of the film is difficult. 

Arguably, the film adaptation has, in some respects, more freedom and opportunity to create thematic links between the stories due to the nature of discontinuous editing. Its movement between the stories is bound only shot-by-shot rather than having to progress in larger chapters. Cinematic techniques such as music, match-cuts and mise-en-scene are used to draw parallels between many of the stories at once, flowing as one larger narrative.

Managing to convey the story (or rather, idea) of 'Cloud Atlas' is inherently difficult, yet this trailer manages it very effectively. The film covers so many genres, from period drama to comedy and sci-fi, that it would be easy to become lost or promote one over the other for its target audience (as happened with the notorious high-budget flop 'John Carter' in 2012). However, the flow of music in the trailer helps it massively to convey the range of genres, styles and emotions felt from watching the film:

1. Cloud Atlas Sextet - slow, light piano and strings convey the sense of warmth and romance.
2. 'Sonera' (Thomas Bergersen) - fast, low strings and chorus over quick editing to convey drama and action elements of the film.
3. 'Outro' (M83) - loud, percussive and highly emotional to convey sense of  beauty and scale, conveying the universal themes which transcend each individual story.

The trailer also makes more use of the links between the stories, using match-cuts and scene transitions that don't appear in the film to keep it together. Whilst the trailer in no way conveys the story of the film, it does enough to cover the bases of the film, generate audience's intrigue and hint at the types of emotion to be felt.