The first trailer for Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken has been released, just over a week after the man at the centre of its incredible true story passed away.

Unbroken, based on Laura Hillenbrand’s book of the same name, tells the story of Louis Zamperini, the son of Italian immigrants who grew up wild and tough on the streets of Torrance, California but eventually found a way to channel his boundless energy through athletics.

A relative latecomer to competitive running, Zamperini switched from the mile (the precursor to the modern 1500 metres) to the 5000 metres on the eve of the 1936 Berlin Olympics when he failed to make the cut for the US track team in his preferred event. He was the US’s best-placed runner in Berlin, finishing in eighth place and running a blistering final lap of 56 seconds – enough to earn him a quick handshake from Adolf Hitler, if not a place on the podium.

Much fancied for a medal at the 1940 Olympics, Zamperini’s career was curtailed, and his life forever changed, by war. He became a bombardier in the US Army Air Force, was shot down over the Pacific in 1943, spent 47 days adrift in a life raft only to be “rescued” by the Japanese, who immediately sent him to a POW camp. For the remainder of the war, he was systematically beaten and tortured by a sadistic guard who saw in Zamperini an opportunity to humiliate an Olympian and thus set an example to the other prisoners.

Unbroken is Jolie’s second feature as director, coming after 2011’s Bosnian war drama In the Land of Blood and Honey. With a budget of $65 million, the Australian-shot film is a major step up for her on that first outing, with an array of settings and time periods, and a relatively unknown (though not inexperienced) cast.

Twenty-five-year-old English actor Jack O’Connell stars as Zamperini, and in the trailer we catch glimpses of him as a young athlete, as a gung-ho airman, as a beaten but unbowed POW, and as a starving castaway.

The clip opens with bombers flying into battle, as a voice – soon revealed as that of a priest in Zamperini’s childhood – intones, “However dark the night, however dim our hopes, the light will always follow darkness.”

Title cards tell us it is the story of “A rebel who became a champion, a champion who became a survivor, a survivor who wouldn’t be broken”.

Jolie had hoped to walk the red carpet with Louis Zamperini, who lived just a few hundred metres from the home she shares with Brad Pitt in Los Angeles, when the film debuts on January 8 next year. Sadly, that chance was denied them both, as he was finally broken, by pneumonia, at the age of 97 on July 2.

smh.com.au