Wachowskis' Cloud Atlas to "Stretch Our Brains Farther than the Matrix"

 People forget that Halle was already an extra in the Merovingian's Hel club in Matrix #3.

As Pope mentioned in his casting round-up, the Wachowski Siblings (writing that’s going to take getting used to) are putting together a new, big-budget sci-fi project and it actually isn’t that button-pushing “gay love affair in Iraq” story, Cobalt Neural 9. Instead, it’s an adaptation of a novel, Cloud Atlas, a genre-bending story that sounds quite heady. Its themes are spelled out clearly as… “the ease with which one group enslaves another, and the constant rewriting of the past by those who control the present..."  

...so that section of the book report's already been done for you.

Joblo found that Halle Berry’s going to star in this because she (I'll go for it) let the cat out of the bag during a Q&A at the NAACP Image Awards. She said she’d be shooting this next year with Tom Hanks and Natalie Portman, and that it'd "stretch our brains even further than the Matrix" - -  which is a bold guarantee, indeed.

I’m a mark for the entire Matrix saga, unabashedly (yes, even Revolutions and the games) as well as Speed Racer (which Rorie so valiantly defended.) I'll confess to seriously questioning where the Wachowskis' heads were at when word got around about Cobalt Neural 9, but this sounds a lot more to my speed. Their work is polarizing, to be sure, but I can think of few other filmmakers today who can make as strange, daring and new material with such high budget power behind them.   

So bring Cloud Atlas on!