Cloud Atlas

It was reported last week that Bae Doo-na has been cast in the upcoming Wachowski brothers film "Cloud Atlas." It's nice to see her doing well and getting attention. I first saw her in "Take Care of My Cat" (one of the first Korean films I ever saw) and in Darcy Paquet's review he says of her that she was "poised perhaps to break out into a major star in 2002." Unfortunately, almost every movie she made after that was a commercial flop, at least until "The Host" in 2006 (a nice way to make up for the years before that by starring in the best selling Korean film ever).

At any rate, I found this interesting:

Bae will appear in the sixth episode playing the role of cloned human Sonmi-450 in a dystopian Seoul in 2144.

The film is to be based on the novel Cloud Atlas, and I decided to look around to find more about its portrayal of "dystopian Seoul in 2144." As it turns out, Gypsy Scholar read the book last year and blogged several times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) about that book (and others by writer David Mitchell, who taught English in Japan for years) and its connections to Korea.

As he notes here, "The story, which I've only begun reading, seems to depict a future Korea in which the North and the South have unified into state capitalist version of a corporatist Juche society."

Sounds like fun. I'll be curious to see how it turns out in the finished film, especially considering how abysmal Korean-made science fiction films set in the future have been (these two come to mind, and on that note this post by Gord Sellar is worth a read).