First Images: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry And More In Tykwer/Wachowski Epic 'Cloud Atlas' [Updated]

With Cloud Atlas set to play TIFF, we knew that images and new info would be arriving soon, and now we've got the first official pics of Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, and Ben Whishaw as they appear in two of the film's six stories.

Written and directed by Tom Tykwer (directing one unit) and Andy and Lana Wachowski (co-directing another unit) the film is based on David Mitchell's novel of the same name, and features all the actors playing multiple roles, some of which have them crossing gender and racial lines. (Hugh Grant says his characters are "incredibly evil," too.) Their characters appear in six stories that cross genres and centuries, but are all thematically related, and linked by paths of intersection between the various characters' lives.

Above you can see Hanks and Berry as they appear in the novel's final story 'Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After,' which takes place in post-apocalyptic Hawaii. (Well, "final" isn't quite right, as readers of the novel know, but that's close enough.) Below you'll find the shot of Broadbent and Whishaw. And more images are coming later today, at which point we'll update.

Update: the promised additional images are here, and available in a flash player below.EW has these images. The shot below is from the story 'Letters from Zedelghem,' and pictures Whishaw as the young musician/composer/lightweight scam artist Robert Frobisher, who takes a job with the irascible and famous composer played by Broadbent.

If things seem a bit confusing, Lana Wachowski told EW,

We thought about these individual characters as aspects of larger characters. Their lives are interwoven over one big story that takes place over a thousand years.

For all the reasons listed above, the film placed very high on my most anticipated films list for this year, and there's nothing in the brief glimpses we've seen so far to put me off that anticipation. Cloud Atlas hits TIFF in September, and opens on October 26.

The powerful, inspiring epic Cloud Atlas explores how the actions and consequences of individual lives impact one another throughout the past, the present and the future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and a single act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.

Update: Here are more images, as promised. They're not huge, which is too bad, because there are some things in this collection that I can't wait to see in huge form. All of the six stories in the film are covered in this collection of pics, and I'd love to know how people who don't know the novel take them all in.