Angelina Jolie’s Christmas 2014 release Unbroken looks like it will be the highest-profile woman-directed picture since Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.
The Louis Zamperini biopic got a three-minute preview that re-introduced the 1936 Olympics athlete and WWII prisoner of war to contemporary audiences. The 97-year-old Zamperini is heavily featured in the Tom Brokaw-narrated video, chuckling over his childhood days as a troublemaker in Torrance, California. The spot leans maybe a little too heavily on uplift: it calls Zamperini’s story “one of the most inspirational stories ever known” and conjures up the righteous patriotism we’re supposed to feel when we think of the Olympics and World War Two.
But there’s no question that Zamperini’s story — of an Italian-American immigrant kid who became a record-breaking long-distance runner, then survived 47 days in open water only to be captured as a Japanese POW for over three years — is worth telling. Given that Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the screenplay, it seems likely that Unbroken will have multiple layers and won’t just be a sugar coated biopic.
Watch the Unbroken spot below:
