Tour the Cloud Atlas

The Wachowski Brothers are returning to the science fiction genre in a big way with this fall’s ambitious Cloud Atlas, based on a sprawling, dense 2004 novel by David Mitchell. The Wachowskis are producing, and Run Lola Run’s Tom Tykwer is directing.

Clocking in at just over five minutes, this trailer feels just as big and ambitious as the film itself, a time-travel story with a number of entangled narrative threads that reach from the 1880s to a post-apocalyptic future. The movie stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving and a host of others playing multiple roles in the various story lines.

Anyone who knows me knows I love a good time-travel story, and this one looks pretty good.  The premise seems to have a bit in common with The Fountain, but hopefully this will be more accessible. The flick’s visuals are lush and have a real European flavor. (I was reminded a little of The Fifth Element by the city scenes.)

Cloud Atlas opens Oct. 26.

Will Looper Tie Us Up in Knots?

The international trailer for this fall’s time-travel thriller Looper makes the movie look a little more complicated than it seemed before by adding a trite element seen in most “assassin” movies: Old Joe is supposed to kill his boss, the capo di tutti capi. Sigh.

I expected a little more from director Rian Johnson and collaborator Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But then again, perhaps they will come up with a unique twist on the clichéd plotline and it was used specifically for that goal. “A double-cross like you’ve never seen before!”

I still like the premise of trying to kill your future self — especially as the younger Joe specifies that what happens/happened to the older version of himself (played by Bruce Willis) doesn’t necessarily have to happen to him. Meaning that his own future isn’t set, and Old Joe’s past can be altered. That’s a very fluid situation!

(Sorry about the ad, but MSN is being very proprietary)

One thing we cannot change: Looper will not be released until Sept. 28.

Looper Trailer Will Hook You In

After a week of teasing from star Joseph Gordon-Levitt and director Rian Johnson, the first full trailer for the time-twisting gangster movie Looper has been released, and I think it does a remarkable job of making the complicated premise easy to understand. Also, the action scenes look exciting, so this clip is really effective.

And it accomplishes all this without including even a single Bruce Willis wisecrack!

The only downside to all this is that we have to wait until Sept. 28 for the movie to open. Because time travel hasn’t been invented yet.

Looper Poster

Have you heard about the forthcoming time-travel crime movie Looper? I know that’s an uninspiring name, but the movie itself is very high concept. It promises to be a noirish hit-man movie that uses time travel as its main trope.

The movie stars Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as older and younger versions of the same character, respectively. To help convince audiences, Gordon-Levitt has been fitted with some subtle prosthetics to make his face resemble Willis’. (Not all movies go to that sort of trouble.)

I really like this poster a lot, because it conveys that the actors are two sides of the same guy, and you can see how the prosthetics just hint at making Gordon-Levitt resemble Willis without looking cartoonish. The playing-card motif makes me want to watch this movie.

I’ll let director Rian Johnson (The Brothers Bloom) explain the plot:

Looper is a time travel movie, set in a near future where time travel doesn’t exist but will be invented in a few decades. It’s pretty dark in tone, much different from [The Brothers] Bloom, and involves a group of killers (called Loopers) who work for a crime syndicate in the future. Their bosses send their targets hogtied and blindfolded back in time to the Loopers, and their job is to simply shoot them in the head and dispose of the body. So the target vanishes from the future and the Loopers dispose of a corpse that doesn’t technically exist, a very clean system. Complications set in from there.

The movie opens Sept. 28, so it gives us something to look forward to this fall. The plan is for some more teaser material to be released this coming week, so let’s keep our fingers crossed that the new material will bolster my good feelings.

EUREKA 4.1: Founder’s Day

EUREKA, they’ve done it! The-powers-that-be have come up with a way to freshen SyFy’s flagship series: by going back to the future forward to the past.

I have sometimes been indifferent to EUREKA, the series about an isolated town populated by supergeniuses, because the stories seemed too repetitive to me. It seemed like every time I tuned in, the plot was about somebody’s fabulous invention malfunctioning and causing havoc. Not that there’s anything wrong with that per se, but what bothered me was Sheriff Jack Carter (Colin Ferguson) and others being stumped about what was happening. Week after week. If I lived in that and cows suddenly started appearing on town roofs every morning, I would say, “Hey! Somebody’s experiment is malfunctioning, and causing havoc in town!” Case closed. (Of course, not every episode was like that; but of the ones I saw suffered from plot holes.)

BEING ERICA 2.13: Pick a Door, Any Door…

Give Erica a hand...

Before moving on to the greatest time-travel series of all…er, time this weeked – a little series called DOCTOR WHO — I would like to close the book on the most recent season of the best time-travel series currently on the air that is not called…well, you know.

The second season saw humungous changes for Erica Strange (the adorable Erin Karpluk). She went from a bewildered patient undergoing time therapy she barely understood, to essentially a therapist-in-training when she was enlisted to help Kai understand the limits of this line of treatment. Along the way, Erica’s relationship with Ethan blossomed and then withered, as she grew to understand that they were simply not right for each. Erin and Ethan experienced everything from a foray into a sex club to arguments over her career – and they locked horns every step of the way. Ethan’s lack of support for Erica’s business aspirations devastated her – almost as much as his vision of the future, in which they are married with kids and a dog. “We are in completely different places,” Erica sniffled, her eyes welling up. “I don’t think that we’re right for each other. And there’s no amount of talking that will fix it. I think we should break up.”