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Neuromancer Movie Deal Moving Forward
chill writes "After years in development, a film adaptation of William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is finally moving forward. According to a press release, the film has secured sales from distributors at Cannes and visual effects work has already begun. Filming will begin in 2012 with locations in Canada, Istanbul, Tokyo, and London."
Just Please don't suck... The books are great and there is a story begging to be made into a movie in them but it would be so easy to screw up...
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
This would have been easier to put together 20 years ago, I think they tried to do a movie a couple of times already but it fell apart.
Nowadays, this is going trying to take the 'futuristic' concepts of global spanning data networks and present them to people that pretty much grew up with them in place, minus the neural interfaces... It was a great book, and I remember in the late 80's was excited to see they were working on a movie. Now, well, I don't think they're going to be able to pull it off.
Next up, Snow Crash? Why not, these things are going to have to be changed so much to make sense in today's terms of technology that they're not really going to be able to resemble the original except in a vague sort of way.
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Neuromancer is not an easy read. The text is very dense. I reread it last year and, even at my education level, found I had to go back and reread many passages when I realized I had missed important bits of action (the death of an important character happens so quickly and non descriptively you have to read the passage several times to make sure it actually happened).
That being said, this book will translate magnificently to the big screen. As old as it is, it hasn't lost its futuristic feel and foresight; although, wherever megabytes of data are mentioned, they'll have to upgrade them to tera- or pentabytes. I am very much looking forward to this film, but it is still in the early stages and I've seen many promising projects like this die at later stages when the producers look at what's going on and don't get it.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
"We have introduced the idea to demographic panels assembled from shoppers at Mall of America, and feedback is generally ambivalent, with many blank stares. However, we have found that this movie will do better in the 18-34 female demographic if 'Neuromancer' is retitled 'New Romancer.' Also, there should be more bodily humor and scatological jokes. 'Too weird', 'I don't get it', 'Something your weird brother would watch', and a doodle of a cat is the dominant impression of the movie from the questionnaire forms. We also suggest cutting the running length from 2 hours, 30 minutes to 45 minutes. This can be accomplished with little damage to the source material and remaining true to the author's original intent, by removing only the plot and the coherency. Plot and coherency seemed to matter the least to the demographic in our surveys."
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes. He will play 'Cyberspace' by wearing a bodysuit covered in blinking LED lights, neon glowstrips and such on a darkened set.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
The book was decades ahead of its time, it's more topical than ever. Gibson is a miracle, imo, not only because he pretty accurately predicted a future where corporations rule the world and information and information exchange has become omnipresent (ok, he overdid both a bit, but what SciFi author doesn't?), he did so without any idea of how a computer works (IIRC he said in an interview that 'til he got one, which was long after '84, he thought there's some kinda crystals spinning inside or something like that).
Gibson's Neuromancer world is a bit more advanced than ours, in good and in bad, extrapolate our reality, add a bit of pessimism and you'll get there. More corporation control, more religious lunacy, bigger separation between wealthy and poor, more integration of technology into human bodies. Some parts of it are reality already or are "around the corner". A bit more dystopian, a bit more seedy, a bit more corporation controlled, but essentially... I think the mood is quite well captured. It's a gloomy near-future setting, which will probably be near-future for the forseeable future, as it was 25 years ago.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yup. William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter. He had never even touched a computer at the time.
If you're expecting anything even remotely resembling actual computery stuff, prepare for disappointment; nobody's going to be nmapping a target and then running sshnuke.
I would disagree that it's badly written; it's not. It's just not written clearly; it's somewhat experimental, so it often makes very little analytical sense. The idea was to convey the overwhelming feeling of constant future-shock, where as soon as you think you have a grip on some new technology a radically newer one comes out. It's kinda confusing if you try to force sense onto things; you're supposed to just absorb it and ride the wave, like the protagonist talks about early in the book IIRC.
On the other hand, it is a pretty cool story. I mean, Molly the cybernetic assassin has razor blade fingers and shades built in to her eye sockets (her tear ducts were re-routed to the roof of her mouth, so she spits instead of crying).
Basically, it's enjoyable as long as you follow the MST3K mantra. If you expect anything that even remotely resembles the realities of computing, you'll be disappointed; it's as factual The Hobbit, except set against a postmodern cybernetic background.
(It's actually kinda weird - geeks seem to have this strange idea that all science fiction should be extrapolation based on current trends, and there's no room at all for pure fantasy with a sciencey coating)