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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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"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
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.
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