Watch The UNBROKEN Trailer And Decide If Angelina Jolie Will Win An Oscar For Directing

Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken features a true life story about battling the odds and a WWII setting – it might as well start its Academy Awards campaign right now. Early buzz has been good – but this looks like the type of awards bait we always get this time of year;  it’ll really need to stand-out from the crowd in this hectic year – one that’s all about Birdman.

Here’s the synopsis:

Academy Award® winner Angelina Jolie directs and produces Unbroken, an epic drama that follows the incredible life of Olympian and war hero Louis “Louie” Zamperini (Jack O’Connell) who, along with two other crewmen, survived in a raft for 47 days after a near-fatal plane crash in WWII—only to be caught by the Japanese Navy and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.

Adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s (“Seabiscuit: An American Legend”) enormously popular book, Unbroken brings to the big screen Zamperini’s unbelievable and inspiring true story about the resilient power of the human spirit.

Starring alongside O’Connell are Domhnall Gleeson and Finn Wittrock as Phil and Mac—the airmen with whom Zamperini endured perilous weeks adrift in the open Pacific—Garrett Hedlund and John Magaro as fellow POWs who find an unexpected camaraderie during their internment, Alex Russell as Zamperini’s brother, Pete, and in his English-language feature debut, Japanese actor Miyavi as the brutal camp guard known only to the men as “The Bird.”

Jolie will use her celebrity to sell this thing, but will it connect with audiences?

Unbroken opens on 26 December 2014.