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Neuromancer: The Movie
Anonymous Coward writes "i don't know if anyone has reported this but there is to be a Neuromancer movie. For those of you who don't know, Neuromancer is a book by William Gibson which basically started the cyberpunk culture. If you're at all interested in computers and/or science fiction, you should read the book and await this movie!
NEUROMANCER.ORG
--horfus " Neuromancer is one of my favorite books (I need to get Cryptonomicon!), and I'd heard a bit here and there about this before, but I'm glad to see it has a website, and should be out in the not-too-distant future. I'm eager to see how the director handles a Gibsonian world (especially compared to Johnny Mnemonic).
Doesn't the content there seem a bit commercial for a ".org"? I don't suppose they intend to donate all book and movie proceeds to charity....
Although, I've heard that overly descriptive style was in vogue in the 1980s and I guess he just hasn't moved out of it.
Why should he? He was responsible for it.
Another complaint I have with both those books is that the protagonists act very weakly. Cade never really stands up to Armitage and the protagonist in Idoru is even worse.
Kind of like real life, eh? That's the whole foundation of good scifi -- the protagonist is a everyman not a chosen one nor god-like, but yet some how manages to usually come out ahead in the end.
The title says it all. I hope they don't commercialize it too far (fat change). Once the movie industry smells money in a certain genre it will be commercialized. There will be commercial cyberpunk movies in the near future, you can count on it.
Gibson was one of my favorites too,
Greg Egan - although I'm not sure that he or anyone else would want to label it as cyberpunk, a term which is rather worn, frayed and actually sort of roadkill-on-a-warm-day-smelly.
Diaspora, Distress and Permutation City. Read them. And Matt Ruff's Sewer, Gas & Electric is a lot of fun as well. (Mutated sharks and an AI-version of Ayn Rand - it doesn't get much freakier)
Don't miss out on Rudy Rucker's White Light either.
Can't think of anything else right now. Have fun.
Now now, don't hold back. Tell us what you really think! :)
But seriously, I don't think it has much to do with the "electronic playground full of intrigue and mystery."
Gibson is revered because he is responsible for the revival of scifi. For a good number of long years scifi was stuck in a rut with very few new good stories. Neuromancer and Gibson's short stories which appeared in publications of the time got scifi writers excited about writing again. He showed them that everything hadn't been done -- there are really are new ideas and new ways of telling stories.
Serves you right, your first post was probably as information-free as the one I'm replying to (and this post, as well).
Funny how Gibson never really started Cyberpunk nor are his ideas purely original. Ever Read any
Philip K Dick? or how about Kings' The Running Man? His plots and story ideas are also old rehashes with new twists. Jhonny is still a businesman trafficking illegal goods and his employer stiffs him.
Now THAT was a good movie! It was disturbing as heck, too...that graphic murder/rape scene was probably a bit TOO realistic for my tastes, though.
Did you ever think that Strange Days is sort of a lineal descendant of the movie Brainstorm? The concept is the same. It's almost as though they took the technology from Brainstorm and went 20 years into the future.
Metropolis is a very important movie! for it's time, even now, it breaks a lot of ground.
I'm really glad that I'm not alone in thinking Gibson is largely overrated. I think it's more by co-incidence that his work somehow co-incides with today's technology, not by design. I can't see that he's a real visionary, although people always get angry when I dare to question him.
Did you see Gibson's X-Files episode? Utterly wretched pap. Complete garbage.
"Neuromancer is *ABOUT* how technology affects peoples lives. It's about the technology that modern man
creates, it's about the creation of bigger entities through the application of technology."
I disagree... sure it features a lot of technology, and it plays a very important role, but I don't think that's the most important part of the story. It's mainly about the SOCIETY that has grown up in and around that technology. The kind of society that involves the Matrix, AIs, etc... As well as the characters roles in this society. If you haven't read "the Difference Engine" I reccomend that you do! To me, it was classic Gibson - all the essential traits of his writing and plots and characters. But it took place a hundred years ago! Sure the technology played a part, but mainly as an excuse for the main story, and the basis for the rather odd "Big secret" story, that I'm still not sure I understand, but have some theories. What an odd ending... But it hints at an awful lot.
Sorry about the AC.. I'm at work and forget my password...
Is Keanu in it?
I forgot.. which day in September is it? I thought I remember seeing a program someone hacked up to display it. ;-)
1970's:
Colossus
When Harley was one
Adolescent of P1
That would be cool to put this out by the MTV movie production company that does k-rad stuff like Varsity Blues! Make Cyberspace SEXY and exciting!! Wooo! Lots of drinking and drugs and sex are what cyberpunks are all about baby. This movie can ONLY succeed if they secure Keanu Reeves as the lead character!
Does not matter...
BOOK IS TOO LONG TO MAKE GOOD MOVIE FROM.
To make good movie find a story that is only 30 to 40 pages long... 1 page is 1 minute of movie time.
It is easier to pad with better dialog... background... FX... then toss whole parts of a book that someone that was important.
Hunt of Red October: bad for at least this reason.
--Lost Double Climate--
Blade Runner: bad for at least this reason.
--Lost Underlying Plots--
Total Recall: good for at least this reason.
--Showed the director's and Writers view of that future world and the dynamics--
2001: the monolith was to be in Saturn's Orbit, but would take to long of movie time to get there.
jackb
Wasn't there a short story (novella?) by Verner Vinge
that's considered the origin of cyberpunk?
I personally found the entire genre rather over-hyped
Two Faces of Janus
Sure, I've read most PK Dick and all the Bachman (King) books.
What I think you fail to realize is the "cyberpunk" movement was a rebirth in scifi literature. Gibson was the (perhaps unaware) spark. It was his works which brought fire to the minds of the other authors. This was something PKD nor King were able to achieve.
Have you read the archives of Cheap Truth, the newsletter of the then evolving "cyberpunk" movement? The culture, although now dead and discarded like a chrysalis browned and shrivled with age, speaks for itself.
you misspelled 'poor'. hope this helps.
you misspelled 'crescendo'. hope this helps.
If you want Trainspotting meets the Matrix try Iain M Banks.
Now there is a man with an imagination.
I'd recommend Excession and Feersum Endjinn.
Come to think of it, his non sci-fi books (written as Iain Banks) are pretty mental as well.
The Lord of the Rings movies (one for each book in the trilogy) are already in preproduction. They're making props, signing actors/actresses, etc. Check out Aint-it-cool or Coming Attractions...
I love it when no-nothing slashdotters try to tell someone who has shaped a genre that they "don't know shit".
There are so many experts...er, undergrads, in here!
Chris Cunningham worked with Stanley Kubrick. That in itself is enough to make you wonder. To the guy that said it will suck: don't be so optimistic! Sheesh, it's people like you that die early from heart attacks. Movies are not intended to be the same as books (otherwise what is the point?) Clearly it is a fairly long ways of from hittting the screen so how can you make comments to that effect?
Not *all* movies have been eroded into the glitzy heroic hollywood norm, in case you haven't noticed.
"Gibson is credited with coining the now generic term Cyberspace, and for envisioning both The Internet and Virtual Reality before either existed. "
- http://www.neuromancer.org/gibsonw1.htm
Wow, I must have been dreaming. I could have sworn the internet was around in 1984...
have you actually SEEN any of cunningham's videos? no, i didn't think so. he is the furthest thing from an "MTV music video director wannabe" i can imagine. first of all, few if any of his clips have been big on eMpTV because he has a silly habit of making videos for (gasp!) talented musicians (squarepusher, aphex twin, bjork, autechre...) second of all, if you had seen his stuff you'd know that he's (with the possible exception of jonathon glazer) the most talented guy making videos right now. he has plenty of talent, don't worry about that.
he's never made a feature film before, so we'll see how he does with telling the plot. but at the very least the movie will be fantastic visually.
His character in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" was a little different from the rest...
This was the ur cyberpunk novel, haven't thought about it years, Thanks.
For a good hacker story:
True Names, Vernor Vinge
Personally, I'd like to see two new TLD's.
.FOO and the .BAR tld's :-)
the
Those who haven't seen it http://www.bjork.mmedia.is/special/aifol/ for lo-fi ease.
Is John Varley's Steel Beach. IMHO this book is the pinnacle achievement of hard science fiction.
Hello? Cybersex? Teenage fantasies? Are you talking about Neuromancer? I'm 20 feet from my paperback, tell me what page the cybersex is on.
Snow Crash was a good book, that would never have been written without Neuromancer comming first.
Take a hike.
Permutation City was an awesome book that I started and never finished. Now that I just got down reading Snow Crash, I will have to read it. Ya, I know, reading these books a little to late. But hey, I used to think reading was really boring until I read a good book like Snow Crash.
Jeff Knox
Dont know what my password is, and script wont mail it to me.
Ahh...
So MELODRAMA is what you're after. Hero Stands Up to Bully, Big Climax. Everything COOL in The End. Sheesh. I thpught we were talking about novels. Go watch a Soap, you can have a CRESCHENDO a day. Neuromancer is Art first, it just so happens that many people find Art entertaining. You are obviously looking for pure entertainment (not a bad thing) but don't judge Neuromancer harshly because it doesn't fit your neat little picture of what makes a good story.
Hey, I too hated the movie, but Rollins kicked ass in it! Too bad the character wasn't even supposed to exist, but Henry was THE MAN.
While Dr. Adder was written before Neuromancer, it was published the same year (1984)and was not nearly so influential. Furthermore, it did not contain "all the classic cyberpunk elements." In particular it lacked the Gibsonian concept of cyberspace that has informed all subsequent cyberpunk (and postcyberpunk) works. Dr. Adder is a good book (albeit not nearly as good or groundbreaking as The Glass Hammer, its successor in Jeter's "Young Man Comes to the City" Trilogy), but it by no means was the "original cyberpunk book." Neuromancer was the first novel to put all the elements we think of as cyberpunk together, and even it had distinct predecessors in Bruce Sterling's The Artificial Kid and John Shirley's City Come a Walkin'.
- Lawrence Person
http://www.delphi.com/sflit/novaexpress/
New Rose Hotel.
;) In a good way.
Whew.
Man.
THAT was story.
Just remembering it makes me want to go down a 1/5 of JD and take some ludes
First of all, Why wasnt there much if any coverage of the movie The Thirteenth Floor on slashdot. There might of been, but it seems to me there wasnt. That was an absolutely awesome movie, that takes the question posed in The Matrix, Are we living inside a computer generated world?, and goes even further with it. They came out like the same week I believe also.
As far as Snow Crash, That should be made a movie. I read it a little late, just finished last week reading it. Snow Crash is absolutely an excellent book, I dont read that often, but never has a book captured me and made me keep wanting to read it like Snow Crash did. It would make an excellent movie.
The Only problem with making movies that are so futuristic is exactly that. I have a feeling most of these new cyberpunk movies that will come out will be done largely by computers, with human actors at a minimum. If you read the Robert Ebert article on movie piracy, it mentioned that the playstation 2 will allow kids to create movies like Toy STory in realtime. If a kids video game machine can do that, film studios should be able to creat very realistic enviroments and humans.
Mmmm. Jeter. He is really good at trashy-feeling novels that you just can't forget somehow. "The Glass Hammer" and "Farewell Horizontal" are personal faves.
The almighty Rose Kolodny aka Molly Millions has been oft-imitated but never quite equalled. This should be the most kick-ass role for some lucky, savvy hollywood vixen. Whoever does get the gig is going to have her work cut out for her out-fighting and out-uber-babe-ing Carrie-Anne Moss, though.
All I ask is that the filmmakers do it right. Please don't fuck this movie up!
Funny you should mention it, WB has the rights
to an incomplete cyberspacish movie by Kubrick,
named "AI", and they are planning to produce it
from the storyboards. It's supposed to use
a lot of CAD (thus the storyboards) and was
scrapped years ago because it was ahead of its
time.
If you're going for Cryptomicon you might
8 6/o/qid=933270835/sr=2-2/002-0912655-20840 19
as well pick up the paperback: Enigma for only
$5. Very good book!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/08041154
Bah. You miss entirely the point of cyberpunk as
originally envisioned by Gibson. No happy endings
no heroes, no hope, just a shrieking grimy subway
train of runaway technology destined to crash
and rot underground. The only thing that makes
a Gibson character a protagonist is the ability
to be merely depressed at the end rather than
psychologically ground to a paste by the boot-heel
of despair. Frankly you're lucky he doesn't have
his "heroes" O/D in an alleyway in the epilogue.
Are We Not Men?
Devo is still around. Mark Mothersbaugh does movie scores (www.mutato.com) so i wouldn't be suprised if he was a part of this...
Gibson has a brilliant writing style. Its extremely cinematographic (but obviously in words). He has a way of fast cutting from scene to scene as if you're watching a movie. The imagery overkill is way to push a precise image he wants you to see, and its a means of conveying a heavy "feel" or "mood" to a story sequence. Very Dashiell Hammet. (I'm surprised Kubrick wasn't interested in doing a movie. Gibson writes like Kubrick product.)
Unfortunately, a great writing style does not save a weak plot/characters. Idoru wasn't a bad book; its flaw was its incredibly formulaic for Gibson.
If economy in expression is what you want in writing, read Hemmingway. But I think its flawed to trash a writer just because *you* the individual do not like his writing style. If you need shorter writing pieces, get his story collection "Burning Chrome". I think its the second best example of his work (after neuromancer).
Roger Zelazny ( many great shorts and novellas)
Rebeca Orr "Becoming Alien" (good for a laugh)
Lee Kilough (especialy "The Doppelganger Gambit")
Orson Scott Card ( almost everything)
Joe Haldeman ( latter stuff beter the first!)
Crawford Killian "Brother Johnathan"
Spider Robinson ( even his hack is fun to read)
Unfortunately I don't have the time to read them all. Which one of these will still have an impact 30 years from now?
Is this comment supposed to be an attack on Rudy Rucker? I ask merely for information.
I've never read Stanislav Lem. What's his most famous book?
Like "Gone with the wind"? Gibson and Cunningham are british, so they don't have to cater to the short attention span of the average american audience.
> net.generation who brought us the September
> that never ended?
Care to elaborate?
Go back to your Disney comics, troll.
It's a true classic.
It should be true to the book's somewhat skewed view of technology- even though Neuromancer has little to do with current networking technology that both isn't what the book is about and isn't relevent considering how relatively far the book is set in the future. (Later cyberpunk offerings were the ones set nearer to our own time- neuromancer is relatively far in the future).
:D
As for relevancy... are you kidding? One of the main points of Neuromancer and the cyberpunk genre is that any world where governments have lost relevence can be as dystopian as utopian. Libertarian wet dreams aside, this certainly bears thought. Certainly the ubercorporations in the genre are relevent... seen the business papers lately? Heard of Microsoft? Read about any business mergers? Oh, and paranoia has never limited itself to the cold war. Go over to usenet sometime.
-^Artful at work (Have login, will travel.. too bad I forgot the pw).
Although these days w/ digital signal locking and blue screens instead of static on a dead channel, it sort of takes away from the dystopian opening.
For it's time though....
>but people are what make the stories interesting
You're actually a woman, aren't you? And you prefer Harlequin books to anything from Del Rey, am I right?
I don't know much about the film, but the book rocked, and in Wired a few months back they had a piece on Neuromancer the movie.
:) referred to to this new director as a genius.
Apparently, the guy whose directing it worked with Kubrick.
Also, they said that Bill "William" Gibson
And if the matrix isn't green, I'll get mad as hell.
red moose
http://amigang.cjb.net - AmigaNG Central, into the wonderful
Sorry to hear that. I guess you'll just have to find something else rather than merely knowing about once uncommon works of fiction to make you feel special about yourself. May I suggest a hobby?
I've read Idoru and Neuromancer and I found them, while having interesting ideas at times, far lacking as novels. They were a pain in the @ss to read because he way overdoes the descriptive language. I mean, how many times did we need to know that one of the guys in Idoru blinked like a maniac? He must have mentioned that 30 times in the book.
Although, I've heard that overly descriptive style was in vogue in the 1980s and I guess he just hasn't moved out of it.
Another complaint I have with both those books is that the protagonists act very weakly. Cade never really stands up to Armitage and the protagonist in Idoru is even worse. They both just go with the flow of action, never really taking control of their lives. The women come across as more vital, but you never really get to know them very deeply.
Also, his books never seem to reach a cresendo. They build, but the very endings are always so lackluster.
Gibson's novels are very descriptive. I won't argue with you there. He deals with subjects that are extremely difficult to describe (take "cyberspace" for example. Can you describe it convincingly?). And yet he describes his metaphysical worlds very well.
But maybe I just like that sort of thing. I like Joseph Conrad too.
2^5
I don't know about you young teenage whippertwerps, but Neuromancer was a pivotal book for me in the 80's.
So this movie had better not suck ass, or it's gonna be really, really, really fucked up.
I'm already freaked though, check this about the director:
One of the hottest young talents to emerge from Britain's music video scene, Chris Cunningham's eye for arresting images and mastery of visual effects have propelled him in three years to the A list of sought after directors. RES magazine says of Cunningham, "...he manages to be humorous, spooky, subversive and unforgettable all in one clip." On "Neuromancer," Cunningham says,"Film shouldn't be about technology, that should be the background. Neuromancer is a thrilling story. It's also about loads of ideas that Gibson had... It's like a detective story where you don't know what's going on. I love things like that, that unfold."
AArrRRGGGH CRAP!!!
Another MTV Music Video director wannabe tries to catapult himself into the movie biz by leaching 'emselves to a culturally pertinent modern work.
"Film shouldn't be about technology"... thats only because nobody in the film industry understands technology well enough to portray it accurately, you MORON!!
Neuromancer is *ABOUT* how technology affects peoples lives. It's about the technology that modern man creates, it's about the creation of bigger entities through the application of technology.
Who wants to place a bet that we get a crappy movie with some lame-ass actor on the up and up, a love story, some violence, a few perfunctory special effects, and a highly modified script that does not resemble the book in any form?
Shit shit shit.
"I love things like that, that unfold."
What the hell sort of lame-ass simplistic hoserspeak is this? Damnit. He comes across as a total dweeb, Mr. Pop Star Video Director, sage of all things interval.
I vote for an Open Source MOVIE!!! Lets get together all the talent we can find and make our own godamn rendition of Neuromancer, TrippinTheRift style...
j.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It's hard to imagine them doing the book justice, but the videos I've seen by that director ("Come to Daddy", "Windowlicker", and "Frozen") have been pretty cool.
Johnny Mnemonic was horrible (it had its moments, but overall, it was horrible), and it doesn't bode well that this is from the same studio.
I think the movie that most captured the Gibson spirit was Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days. And it did so without even using cyberspace, or being set far in the future. Absolutely brilliant movie.
Uh, maybe that's because Snow Crash was comedy and Neuromancer was noir? I'm always amazed at how many people totally miss the joke, and don't realize that Snow Crash is at least half parody of the very genre it is putatively a member of.
I loved Snow Crash, but comparing it to Neuromancer is like comparing ``Dr. Strangelove'' and ``Fail-Safe.''
"Technical Details"?
Hee hee haw haw ho ho ho hahahahahahaha
Ahem. Sorry. That whole deal with visors and what-not... or beliebability -- a mutant Aleut is the most dangerous man in the world? There were plenty of technical errors -- errors where Neal Stephenson bothered to go into exacting detail, only to get the details wrong. *sheesh*
Neal Stephenson spends a lot of time making an interesting world, it seems to me, but William Gibson seemed to have a better grasp of humanity; a better grasp of what's important to the story.
Although I liked both Snow Crash and Neuromancer.
--Matthew
When was Final Fantasy not mainstream? Most of the video gamers I know that played video games when the Nintendo was big remember FFI fondly. If not that, I seem to recall FFIV and FFVI being quite popular. And of course, William Gibson and J.R.R. Tolkien are considered 'must reads' or 'good authors' by most people who bother to read books. Looks like you're more interested in being part of a particular subculture than avoiding the mass market.
/. But then, these things happen; ideas and forums and objects rise and sink in popularity, and the good old days and the bad old days will never be repeated.
Besides, if'ns ya bother to ask me, the person you happen to be is defined not by how you are different from the crowd, or how you are the same. Such caricatures of personality are shallow and only relative.
To be honest, I feel similar twinges when I see all the people posting to
Sorry to get so off-topic.
--Matthew
Bladerunner? Another movie that pales next to the book it was (not really much) based on.
Johnny Mn. is a great flick IMHO. But taste is personal. Rollins was really great in that though.
Neuromancer movie rumors have existed since the early 90s. In fact, at a convention I went to back in 1989 (I think), I saw a neuromancer movie script for sale. I don't know why it keeps fizzling out, but it does, constantly.
Maybe now that there is the mainstream culture to support it, the movie will be made (i.e., the fact that Matrix was a hit).
service" was a TERRIBLE LINE!
However, it's hard to believe that bit of tripe
*WAS* from William Gibson's hand (And I am
talking about the screenplay, not the original
work... here's the IMDB entry for
JM.
I think at the time of the production of the movie,
there was talk of a Neuromancer movie, but no
definite word, so I have a feeling that Gibson
tried to encorporate a few of the elements that
existed in the other Neuromancer books into
this (as well as his more recent series which the name slips, but the bridge is a definitely pointer to that). It obviously didn't work very well.
My only concern is that Neuromancer is good at two
levels: the idea of cyberspace and what the real
world is like because of it, and the writing style
such that you can read it twice and get two different impressions of what's going on. It's
not that Gibson is vague, but his language is
used so well that the reader's emotions will
read into the story. Sometimes when I read it,
Case is the good guy, sometimes he's an
innocent being dragged along by Wintermute, and sometime's he's the villian, cracking into
3Jane's private life. There is no way in heck
that the movie can convey that; instead, we
*ARE* going to know what finally happens, FOR
SURE, and the mystism of the book will be wrecked.
He might be able to keep some ideas arguable
(For example, this was done with the woman scientist on the plane in the final scene of 12
Monkeys; how exactly was she in "insurance"?)
but I believe that after seeing this movie,
I will never be able to read Case as any of the
3 situations above.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I had problems with "The Diamond Age," mostly that it didn't really seem to have an ending as much as Stephenson just stopped writing. A lot of the nanotech ideas were very cool though. I had some of the same problems with "Snow Crash" -- he just seemed to stop writing.
I personally recommend anything written by Bruce Sterling, especially his short stories collections.
You're right, there's no cybersex in Neuromancer. There is a short section on a snuff brothel, though. Given that any movie that is made is going to be aimed at young teenagers, I suspect details like that will get skipped.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Now, I really, really, REALLY, want there to be a film adaptation of Neuromancer, don't get me wrong. But now that Stanley Kubrick is dead, I seriously doubt that anyone can do it justice.
/. headline, I realized that this latest effort will either
While my first reaction was, "Oh, YESSS!" when reading the
a) fizzle out in pre-production;
b) suck really badly;
c) prove that Gibson was a one hit literary wonder (well, two: "Burning Chrome" was a great prequel/anthology, but "Count Zero" and "Mona Lisa Overdrive" were lacking), if he has anything to do with the screen play.
BTW, has anyone seen the North American release of "Eyes Wide Shut" yet? Do you know if Kubrick approved the editing necessary for the NC-17 rating? (I don't care how much nudity is in the original -- if Kubrick though some was unnecessary, I'm willing to see a cut version, if not, then no way.)
In Liberty, Rene
Heh, for me it's the opposite. I like most Brin books, but I thought "Earth" was a load of bat guano.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Whoa, that was one HUGE hard drive for 1991... Back then, I paid $500 for my 150 MB drive.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
That one as well. In fact, just about every damn thing he's ever written, although some books require a stronger stomach than others.
Give Ken McLeod a try also...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Neuromancer is probably going to suck for just this reason - that CC is going to go gonzo on the music video special effects, and leave any sort of character or plot development to the dogs. The whole thing that made Neuromancer's world so compelling were the type of people that inhabited the Sprawl. Just making a cool looking city, and neat-o cyberspace effects, inhabited by cardboard cutouts of characters will make a shitty, disappointing movie. Case was a perfect Anti-Hero - he encountered transcendence, touched divinity, and then went back and got a new liver so he could take more drugs. He simply didn't care about anyone but himself. How has hollywood ever made a protagonist like that? Even Ralph Fiennes from Strange Days was a good guy, albiet an ambiuous one. Try and imagine how hollywood is going to treat the sexual encounter between Molly & Case in the foam-padded 'hotel room'. Do you really think that it's going to be in tune with the character's attitudes, or is it just going to be an excuse for CC to show off Molly's body (probably with more cybernetics than we expect).
Neruomancer was compelling because it was about people who were not heros, who were not hollywoodesque leading men & women - they were moral and physical degenerates that needed to be threatend with thier life and have the capacity to take drugs be cut off in order to get them to do anything.
Do we really think that this is what we're going to see in the movie? Or are we going to see Case as an actual 'hero' who actually cares about what he is doing? And if we, god forbid, do actually see someone as degenerate and apathetic as Case on the screen, is it going to be enjoyable to watch? (See Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas for an example of something that can be enjoyable to read, but not to watch). Neuromancer was an excellent book, because Gibson took (in some people's opinion too much) advantage of the English language to describe everything in a nearly poetic and gritty manner. Is seeing it on the screen going to be at all worthwhile? I doubt it.
This is going to suck.
That's not quite true... although _Dr Adder_ was written in 1970 (and is one Class A heavyweight badass motherfucker of a book. If you like cyberpunk, read it!), it did not make it to print until 1984, after _Neuromancer_ launched the mainstream cyberpunk movement. This despite the fact that Philip K Dick worked for years to get it published (and all the more amazing because the novel brutally parodied Dick as the radio station KCID, playing old German opera and irrelevant news).
Yes, _Dr Adder_ technically predates _Neuromancer_. But that's just because it was so far ahead of its time.
---
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Admittedly, Escaflowne is not so cyberpunkish as the others, but it's got supurb animation and an excellent storyline. Naturally you'll need to watch episodes in order, and I suggest you stick with subtitled anime; most dubs are pretty bad.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
'The book was better than the film'
The only exception I have ever seen to this rule was Starwars, where the books were crap.
If this is true i sure hope the result will be less like Johnny Mnemonic, and more like Blade Runner.
I've always preferred Sterling's Shaper/Mechanic short stories to his cyberpunk novels. Personally, the problem that I have with cyberpunk is that _Neuromancer_ pretty much covered everything that could be done in a cyberpunk world. Later novels (including Gibson's own) just seemed to repeat the same themes.
The movie which best captures Gibson's style is a great (but not well known) Italian/French movie called Nirvana (http://www.nirvana.it). Has anyone else out there seen it?
My guess is that we need a European movie to do it right, Hollywood just can't catch the nuances and humor properly.
It was mentioned that the movie was coming soon in the computer game docs (this was a long time ago, back when you could still buy C64 games). I think the old production company (Cabana Boys IIRC) went bust and the rights went back to Gibson. I saw a copy of the screenplay at a SF bookshop once but it was sealed and I was too cheap to buy it.
--
enterfornone - logging in for a change
Don't dismiss Metropolis's relevance too quickly. Yeah, the technology's sort of silly, but the Big Picture hold up rather well.
And dammit, now you've got the Metropolis theme music stuck in my head. Dah-da... da-da-da da-da... grrrr
----------------------
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
There are so many experts...er, undergrads, in here!
On behalf of all the non-clueless, non-moronic, and non AC college undergrads, HEY!
0 1 - just my two bits
I want to see "Snow Crash" as a movie please. It's the only cyberpunk that I've ever read that doesn't feel like a kiddie book. I'm not interested in cyber-sex, or teenage fantasies. I'm not interested in suspending my disbelief too much.
Can someone recommend other cyberpunk books that are written for people who know something about computers and appreciate plausible technical details?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I wonder if Bill Gates is a big Gibson fan--it seems that the term "microsoft" comes from Neuromancer. Another odd thing is Gates' digital image collection that he supposedly "owns" (owning digital images!). In at least one of the Gibson novels, a very rich man also does the very same thing...
"I control the Mouse, the Mouse controls me."
yeah he's more than likely doing the film but in someways even better is it's likely that Aphex will do the soundtrack.
I'd say someone is just trying to generate enough buzz to get some real money interested. Now they've just expanded pitch-space into the web.
Here is link to a recent thread about Neuromancer from Aint It Cool News. The script the guy is discussing in from 1990! I still think this is low level buzz.
Or, from the ends of my fingers at least.
Greg Egan.
The best Sci-fi I've read for a long time.
They have been talking about this movie for quite some time. I have heard that it was caught up in a legal battle for awhile that about killed the whole project. And still made things difficult for a lot of people. Example: remember the lady in the movie "Johnny Mnemonic"? In Gibson's original short story, that was Molly, the same samurai from "Neuromancer" (if you read Neuromancer close enough, you'll see that she even gives a little "Where Are They Now?" about Johnny). But because of the legal things with Neuromancer, they were unable to use Molly in the movie version of "Johnny Mnemonic" (which I have never seen, mostly because Keanu Reeves can't act).
All-in-all, I'm excited about this movie. It has the potential of being better the "The Matrix" (which was a great movie that even Keanu's lack of acting skill couldn't diminish). I've read "Neuromancer" about five times (it took me twice to understand) and I'm interested in how they are going to pull it off - it is not an easy book to make a movie version of.
Unfortunatelly, there's no real information at the site... Just a few names - Author, Producer, Director... But anyway.
Now that The Matrix has shown that a good cyberpunk movie, with effects, can be done, maybe we will see a good vision of Neuromancer. Personally, Carrie Ann Moss (?) is a dead-ringer for Molly (IMHO). The "Dodge This!" line summed it up for me. Some unknown as Case, and Brian Denehy or Rutger Hauer as Armitage might work..
With the Predator camouflage on the street punks, The Matrix 'lobby scene'ish run to free Dixie Flatline, a bit of 2001 (as seen by Terentino) at Villa Straylight - and this puppy just might work.
But of course after Gibson sold out on the cinematic version of Johnny Mnemonic, I won't be holding my breath.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Let's not forget:
Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
LeGuin - Left Hand of Darkness (speaking of the human condition)
Asimov - Foundation I-III, personal favorites
Herbert - Dune
Stephenson - Snow Crash
[I forgot] - Gravity's Rainbow
And certainly not least Straczynski - Babylon 5 - Absolutely Brilliant!!
BTW: Gibson - Olga's Seashell.. in Burning Chrome collection. read it.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Hellraiser (in all it's gory) is exactly what we (I) wouldn't want to see Neuromancer become. Hellraiser is an example of precisely what people are afraid Neuromancer will be.
A movie full of visuals, ad nauseum, effects upon effects, wich obviously accounted for 90% of the film's budget. Very BAD acting, no plot to speak of whatsoever. Some miniscule interaction between characters that is so vague that it could fit into ANY movie in the genre...
If Neuromancer becomes Hellraiser in Cyberspace, Gibson should commit hari-kari for ever letting it be made.
C'mon now. There's potential to make a 2001, and you have me expecting Event Horizon.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Two side notes:
One: if you haven't seen the director's cut of Blade Runner, you owe it to yourself to go rent it now. It far outshines the commercial release, with a good deal of important (and completely surreal) footage left in, and the annoying Mickey Spillane-esque monologues cut out.
Second: Henry Rollins played down in Baltimore at the annual WHFS concert (called the H-Eff-Esstival). One of the DJ's tried to talk to him backstage in his dressing room, and Rollins chased him out, yelling "bitch-boy" at him and apparently threatening to kick his ass. The DJ wrote a song about it, appropriately entitled, "Henry Rollins is going to beat me up."
We sang that song every time he came onscreen in JM. Fun stuff.
I went to see Strange Days in the theater. Took my now-wife. She had to leave partway through, and I wound up following her out.
Don't get me wrong - in a lot of respects, this movie did everything exactly right. It was terrifying, and human - what particularly sticks in my mind was the annoying yuppie "wire-tripping" for the first time to a recording of a 13-year-old girl taking a shower. However, the film contains the most graphic and disturbing sexual assault ever portrayed in a sci-fi movie (to my knowledge), and my wife just couldn't take watching after that. She was so freaked out I wound up following her out to comfort her.
"The sky ... was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
... = "over the harbor" or "over Chiba". Something like that.
(I THINK the
It's been known that there would be a Neuromancer movie eventually. I just hope they won't fsck up the story like they did with Johnny Mnemonic. Come to think about it they even screwed up the characters in Johnny. Anyway, the neuromancer.org website seems to be pretty uninfomative.. and boring.
Besides, why does a commercial movie reside at a ".org" domain? Eh?
Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, Shockwave Rider.
Admittedly, Brunner doesn't have a firm conception of "cyberspace" as a separate existance, the base idea for most of later cyberpunk work, but these 3 novels capture very well the whole corporate-run, enviromentally decaying, privacy-free world that informs most of cyberpunk literature.
Check it out.
The only example of a novelisation being better than the film on which it is based is The Abyss. This was Cameron's last good film, but the book by Orson Scott Card is just plain excellent. I don't know whether it's still in print, but it's eminently readable.
My big problem is that with most of Gibson's books, the plot is incredibly twisted and convoluted. I found myself going back to reread things just so they made sense! Not that this is a problem with the books - I LOVED it. But I think it'll be awfully tricky to do in movie form without simply telling all the events in the order that they happened, rather than the order which they are told in the book... That might wreck some stuff.. maybe not. Of course, the usual problem of too much stuff in the book to fit a 2 1/2 hour movie applies too... I think 6hr movies should happen more often!!! :)
A movie is different than a video, and requires more than just stunning visuals. Story is what moves things along, and if the director is too involved in the visuals to pay attention to the story, you end up with Inspector Gadget.
I remember in Jr HS one of my friends said something surprising about the specs he had seen for a UNIX machine a university had. You see the computer had 64 megs.......of RAM! hahahaha
You're not laughing??
The surpsise is that you think the person is going to say hard disk space, or say nothing at all because 64 megs is so huge it's obvious that it's the hard disk size. I had a 20MB drive and many of my friends didn't have any. It's probably funnier and more memorable if you were in Jr HS at the time..
Oh well, please moderate this down for being offtopic or flamebait or something. The 64mb memory chip thing just made me remember.
I'm no cynic, but this will be a bad film. The book - which was my bible for a year - reflected the paranoid 80's cold-war zeitgeist, not the wonderful world we're moving into as governments slowly become irrelevant. The film can't win: if it's true to the book it'll be no more relevant than 1930's "Metropolis", and if it updates the film with Internet refs it won't do justice to the book.
Either way, I expect effects will substitute for acting, since Hollywood's forgotten how to act. Argh!
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
Okay - there were some problems - I hate Keanu Reeves... to me he is a prick - and I hated the very first scene in the movie when he woke up cause the line came off like he was THE prick - but when you get right down to it, Johnny was a prick as well, I thought.
Henry Rollins was very cool as the doctor, and Ice-T was, well, Ice-T - I love his attitude.
I do wish they had explained some stuff to the audience a bit better - like that particle beam thingy the bad guy had in his fingernail. A lot of the audience giggled at that, but I knew what it was because I read the book.
I can't wait for Neuromancer either. Ever since I read it I have wanted one of those implants like the girl had where you could have the time of day displayed in your vision. That would be major cool.
Mister programmer
I got my hammer
Gonna smash my smash my radio
Whenever Cyberpunk is invoked, it always seems folks forget KW Jeters earlier novel "Dr. Adder," which contained all the classic cyberpunk elements.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
That's not entirely true. Antoine Fuqua was a music video director, but then went on to make The Replacement Killers. Personally I thought that movie was spectacularly done, and rich in plot.
Also, the Come to Daddy video was brilliant, as well as Cunningham's follow-up video for Aphex Twin, Windowlicker. I think we can expect the best from Cunningham.
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
I played the PC version, and man, talk about the best "soundtrack" ever to come out of the stock speaker...
What a great piece of warez. Where else can you sell your own organs so as to buy better equipment?
In almost all cases, whichever came first is better.
Gibson's books aren't science-fiction. They're so-so adventure books set in a badly explained, pseudo-science nightmare.
Someone once said "Write what you know." It's obvious that Gibson does NOT follow that advice.
His books would be much better if he hadn't tried to build up a world he didn't understand.
I had the good fortune to get a chance to see a script for Neuromancer when the hype first started, around 1988-1989.
If the script that's being used is the same one I saw, a LOT of stuff from the book was cut out, but the script was still around 170 pages or so -- nearly a 3 hour film.
At that length, studios might be reluctant to make it.
This could be very cool if they choose to step outside of the hype and make something thats true to Gibson's novel, unlike Johnny Mnemonic, which was a shitty movie altogether. Honestly I don't see how they're gonna bring Case to the big screen and not ruin it, but I sure as hell hope they do... This was my favorite book for a VERY long time..
Neuromancer has Long been a favorite of mine. Like most I was highly excited and then hugely disappointed by 'Johnny Mnemonic'; although the soundtrack Rocked. So much so that I found myself defending the brilliance of William Gibson by having people read the shorts of 'The Burning Chrome'.
I'm sure we can all know who to expect to be cast as Case . . . Keanu. Especially on the heels of 'The Matrix'; another in this genre with a kick-ass soundtrack. PLEASE, NO KEANU REEVES. Talk about one dimensional actors. Every one of his characters are EXACTLY THE SAME.
Maybe Neuromancer as a full length animation?
"the sky above the port is the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel"
The rumors about this have been around a *long* time...since before the C=64 game was but a fond memory.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
Best line in The Matrix...
"You're not really very bright, are you?"
Anything KR does , Johnny Depp could do 10x better. KR is just a dumb pretty boy, he has no edge whatsoever. Hell, Depp could probably do a spaced out surfer dude better than KR...
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
I notice once again that totally innapropriate comments are moderated up to 2 or even 3, while comments germane to the topic are at 0 or even -1 simply because they are anti-gibson or dare to mock the sick joke that is the so-called 'cyberpunk' culture.
Fuck you, moderators.
First line of Part 1, Chiba City Blues.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
Wonderful book...
There was an article in Wired about this, just a teeny blurb. But it said something about Gibson having his hands in this movie. He seemed really excited about it, saying that he was critical of what was gonna happen - but that he was pleased with what was being done. I'm sure that by the time that this movie comes out, movie technology will be better. I'm excited about it - definately. The only thing that I'm afraid of is how much of the book is gonna be toned down so that it appeals to more audiences.
Anyone remember the "William Gibson directed" episode of "The X-Files"? Heh - Invisigoth.
-Alan
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
However, there are some books by Brin that didn't do much for me, so pick carefully.
-Alan
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Some may think I'm overanalyzing, but go read some of the stories and give them a fair shake.
-Alan
The hour of noon has passed. Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.
For me,the most amazing thing about this book was how Gibson could just nail the nascent spirit of net hacker culture without having a clue about the underlying tech. The book is a wild mix of high-voltage prose poetry, eerily insightful takes on the feeling and attitudes of the subculture, and incredibly dumb takes on the technology involved. I read the book when it first came out in the mid-80's when I was already on the net and I was just stunned at how well this lit guy "got it." I think it will be hard to do justice to this book in the movie both since you will miss the edge of the prose and because we can no longer feel the surprise of the culture that Gibson could see so far ahead of almost anyone else.
Yes. I heard about this a while ago...
Chris Cunningham was the creative genius who made Aphex's "Come To Daddy", "Windowlicker", Madonna's "frozen" clip, and, my favourite, Autechre's "Second Bad Vilbel".
IMHO this guy has made the the most disturbing, dark, and creative videos ever seen.
This film should be the best scifi movie to date.
Johnny Mnemonic? bah!
good story, extremely pore execution on celluloid.
Scipher
-----------------------------------------(((((
I read the review of Neuromancer in Dragon(tm) magazine (D&D nerd and computer geek all at the same time - what are the odds?). Went out the same day, bought a copy and read it three times in a row. As books go, it was a "killer app" for me.
I just hope that Chris Cunningham (the director) can stick with his plan to keep the focus on the plot and not the f/x. Far too many movies these days seem to believe that a lot of cool graphics can obviate the need for a good plot or decent acting. Case in point (as many others have said here) is Johnny Mnemonic. If Neuromancer turns out to be a piece of crap like that it will break my heart...
I'm pretty sure it takes the Sophistry chip to get off the desert island. I can't believe I remember that if it's right but I loved that game too. Played it first on my trusty C-64 (complete with digitized Devo intro music), then on a friend's Apple ][GS, then on Amiga. I really, really want some geniuses to remake this for Linux and other powerful pc's with 3d cards and the like. I even went so far as to install an Amiga emulator just to get to play this but alas, the emulation world is fraught with woes. And I forgot what to type at a CLI prompt. :(
I apologize to Rudy. I should have edited that first line out. Sorry Rudy.
My fault for responding while getting ready for work (at "Agilent Technologies", eegads!).
I hope that I sounded more constructive in the rest of my comment.
by John Brunner
Of course, Nickie doesn't need any terminal or 'trodes to use cyberspace, he can do it with a touch tone phone.
It's a classic, written in the '70's, and very little of the book takes place in cyberspace, but it's a heck of a ride.
George
Ya gotta admit it, heavey paranoia, drugs, sex, technology perverted for evil uses, and a general dystopic air.
Oops, it has too much humor though, except Snow Crash was kind of funny.
George
Back in 1991 I think, a screamer, 486dx66, 2 gig HD, SCO UNIX, I forget the RAM, but I had to pick a name, and Neuromancer was one of my favorite books at the time.
George
At the risk of making my post disappear into the noise I will reply to this post instead of making a root level one.
There were at least three virtual reality movies this year. The Matrix, eXistenZ, and the 13th floor. The Matrix kicked ass as everyone knows. eXistenZ was one of those cheaply made independent movies, that covered the same VR/real life confusion premise as every other VR movie in existance (including Total Recall). I haven't bothered seeing the 13th floor because frankly I'm burned out on the whole "what if real life is just a simulation" bit (also covered by Descartes dream argument), the box office results were terrible (I know, I know), and the previews annoyed me. "You can GO there EVEN though it DOESN'T exIST." "What did you do!" "I Turned it Off!" Sounds like a good idea to me. Not only that but "13th floor" not existing is a bad pun, of which I fault much of country music (don't ask).
In fact, I do believe that if you look up the Sci-Fi cliche list, that premise is listed as a cliche. If you were to submit a story like that to a science fiction literature publisher they would reject it in two nanoseconds.
Any news on who's doing the soundtrack this time round?
The guitarist Robert Fripp (of King Crimson fame) reported a few years back how he started work on a soundtrack in the late eighties. (More info on Fripp and his contemporaries can be found at the web site for his company Discipline Global Mobile or at Elephant Talk - an enthusiast site.)
FYI...
(ceci n'est pas un
A great short story published in 1980. I don't know if Vinge "knew anything about computers" or not, but in this story he managed to capture the flavor of online culture in a way that still rings fresh and true. I suggest all you lovers of classic, hard SF give it a read.
See True Names and Other Dangers and True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier at Amazon.
I have a feeling that the masses might hear the word 'matrix' and either:
:)
a. get confused (because it took some explaining before they understood the matrix in 'The Matrix', now they have to learn a new definition).
or
b. Think that this is a movie that is just trying to capitalize on the success of 'The Matrix'. (and you have to wonder about that one).
It would be _really_ confusing if Keanu was cast in Neuromancer.
I liked Neuromancer (although I should re-read it). And William Gibson is Canadian!
Kewl beans...
;)
I borrowed the book from a friend a few weeks ago...slowly Ive been getting through it...and I have to say IT ROCKS!
I highly recommend it to all slashdotters...just please keep in mind...when the book was written...32 *or was it 64* meg memory chips were probably science fiction
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
that neuromancer has been in pre-production. i've heard about various contract level negotiations for a movie version of the book since 1991 or so (which is about the time i heard about gibson) but then again this is the internet so.....
the site is pretty much vapor. loads slow even on a t3 - almost as slow as blairwitch.com. looks purty though - index animation is kinda nice although that font makes me think of some satanic version of mash in space.
i'm not really that excited but, hey pal, that's life in the breakdown lane.
God, I feel so...NORMAL writing so many serious posts in a row. Shudder.
:)
Anyway, the book was incredible; just about everyone agrees on that. But the computer game waas kickin' as well.
I spent COUNTLESS hours in front of my good old Apple IIc+ (with the processor overclocked to a P450, of course) making my character plod around the city looking for jacks and better decks. Sure, the dude was bright blue and looked like something out of the original Double Dragon, but it was a hell of a game. Cyberspace just looked COLD, but strangely alluring as well. The first time I accidentally discovered an AI hiding beneath the ICE, I nearly freaked out. The rush as I discovered the node for semi-hidden Copenhagen University and managed to hack inside, getting my hands on softwarez two levels above my current arsenal, almost made me feel like a real cyberspace cowboy. Okay, maybe not that far.
It took me about 5 years (taking a three year sabbatical) to actually beat the damn thing, and even then it took some minor help from an online walkthrough. A quality book, a quality game.
If they fuck up the movie, I won't be happy.
-
I have no idea how they are going to do this in a real life movie actor kind of way. I haven't seen The Matrix enough to decide whether the same sort of nutso effects could be used to do Neuromancer justice on the screen, but almost immediatly after reading the book for the second time about 2 years ago, I thought that the only possible way (or at least a very good way) to bring Neuromancer to life would be to make the entire movie as an anime. (why do I expect to be flamed for that last one?)
After watching a few movies like Ghost in the Shell, I was pretty sure that if done properly the animation medium would be ideal for this movie. I think I would be against live action for this one, but then it might not meet with commercial success (and then become a cult film! hey, not so bad...) as The Matrix did. I don't know. I would steer towards doing it really well with animation, but if they manage to do it, I hope they do it damn well. This is a story that deserves to be told properly. Special FX technical wizardry isn't that necessarry, look at Tron, the FX worked. (I personally think that cyberspace might look like it was being drawn by a huge color Vectrex, but that's just me. Also might require someone lugging laser projection equiptment to augment the actual film... hmm. ok, bad idea.)
All I can hope is that they do this story right, because whether you liked the book or not, it was important, and it deserves better treatment than to be turned into another Johnny Mn.
certron
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
I don't know about 6 hr movies, but maybe make a 2 or 3 part movie or... hmm. hey, maybe someone could make it as an art film or something, spend the money on production and not on advertising, release it in those little theatres, and make sure it's really really good and let the word of mouth carry it. I wish that movie ticket prices weren't so high, and that a mini-series of movies was more possible. I'm sure there is some way to break things up so that they make sense by themselves and just tell enough of the story for one movie.
If you really watch Star Wars, there isn't really that much story in each movie (or at least the story is very well spread out over the entire film) but when the movies are watched in sequence, the whole thing comes into much better focus. I would seriously favor the mini-series approach, although I doubt that this will be supported by the people with the money. The idea seems to be make a good-enough product, hype it, and then just wait for the money to come in.
If you watch ID4 enough, you'll realize it's really just a big global PR scheme. [sigh] Uplifting but empty. Oh well.
I still want this on as anime. Maybe it'll be anime's 'big break' in the US. Maybe not. (Hopefully after having been introduced to 'the masses' the quality won't go completely downhill, but... this is America...) certron
fair.org counterpunch.com truthout.com indymedia.org salon.com
eff.org guerrilla.net debian.org gentoo.org
One thing I will say, and that is that the site's opening sequence on my modem (33.6) looked like a slide show gone wrong. If the guy who designed the site is as much a professional as the blurb says he is, then you'd think he'd know that one of the golden rules with DHTML is surely to cache/download ALL of your pictures/elements *first*, and THEN animate them...not animate them while the person's modem is still trying to download them at the same time.
If there was ever a wish list for this film, here's my $.02:
Remember that good science fiction is fiction first, science second. It's all well and good that we can manipulate reality on film, but don't sacrifice the story for the effects. The really good books of science fiction rely more on the charaters, their experiences, reactions, and emotions to tell the story than they do on gizmos and gear.
I can think of a few examples here, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Chris Cunningham is definitely a master of
visuals as anyone who has seen the Aphex Twin
video can tell you. Scary stuff.
I guess it just remains to be seen how he copes
with realising the story, it's really a matter of
how he has perceived the book, but it sounds
promising.
I also hope he's clever enough not to make any of
the mistakes of `Johnny Mnemonic', the use of
`Alternative' actors maybe one of the worst (Ice
T, Henry Rollins, Dolph Lundgren? Give me a
break...).
Anders.
____
ZZ
Isn't neuromancer.org being a little pretentious when it suggests that Gibson 'envisioned the Internet before it even existed'? I mean, there was no www.pepsi.com in '84 but the internet was already around.
Looks like he's going to have to duke it out with Al Gore to decide who really invented the Internet.
But remember that Gibson also worked on the screen play for Johny Mnemonic.
I saw an interview with him in which he was saying how wonderful everything was with that movie. No offence to the guy, but he does have an interest in getting people to see it. He's hardly going to get another movie deal if he starts complaining about creative control.
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
Hollywood doesn't butcher good books by mistake-- it's done entirely on purpose to suit the medium and the perceived market.
They'll get a teen heart-throb for the girls, make sure there's marketable merchandise, load the movie with pointless cliches, corporate advertisements, chase scenes, and the basic formula:
(1) character introduction
(2) some injustice to create a revenge motive
(3) the struggle
(4) bad guys are coming out ahead
(5) good guy is brutally beaten
(6) good guy gets a last reserve of energy and beats bad guy to a pulp.
(7) good guy turns his back, bad guys raises the gun
(8) good guy blows away bad guy
I think most sci-fi/action movies in the past 15 years have near-identical plot lines. It's not easy to enjoy them when you know exactly what's going to happen. This may not exactly be the book, but Hollywood will find a means of formulizing it into their terms.
That is because the movie script was written before the books.
The idea that Lucas had all 6 episodes written was a publicity stunt essentially.
Also, the opening sentence to the book was incredible. Just wish I could remember exactly what it was.... but i thought it instantly set a mood. impressive.
So "Neuromancer: The Movie" has the potential to be great. With a faithful director who actually gets what the book is about, the right actors and at least some input from Gibson, if not an entire screenplay (so Gibson may have been less-than-impressive with his "Johnny Mnemonic" screenplay; however, having Keanu Reeves and Henry Rollins reading his lines didn't help anything), and we've got one hell of a movie on our hands. But what are the odds? I just don't think there is any way Hollywood (or any of its overseas brethren) can get this right. We're either going to see too much flash, or not enough of the technology, a screenplay that doesn't even begin to measure up to Gibson's prose or have a film that misses the point altogether. Personally, I would rather have Gibson's world go unrealized than risk having his universe as I currently imagine it become tainted with memories of an ill-conceived film.
I'm not saying that the movie world should avoid Gibson entirely; I just want to make sure that it is done right, and I'm not sure that "Neuromancer," in its current incarnation, will be what I want to see. A Gibson-based project that did intrigue me was an adaptation of Count Zero called "The Zen Differential." What excited me about that was the alleged director, Michael Mann. As a director, I trust Mann. He gave us one of the top crime films of the last few decades (and the most underrated movie of this one) in "Heat." At one point, I had even heard that this movie was nearing a premiere at a film festival, but since then, it's disappeared entirely from the IMDb.
Look. Gibson can write. If the Sprawl trilogy didn't convince you of that, check out "My Obsession," and article he wrote for Wired a few months back. Let the man produce a screenplay that he feels embodies the essence of his work. Then let him find a director that shares his vision. Please, please, don't sell out what could be a great movie to the Hollywood mainstream. They'll only screw it up.
Uh, a 1MB chip was science fiction back then.
I did PC support at the 1984 Olympics. In 1983 and early 1984, for several THOUSAND dollars, you could
equip your IBM PC with 640KB (yes, kilobytes) of RAM. We had one Lotus 1-2-3 app that needed a lot of memory, so we equipped a PC with half a dozen full-length cards stuffed with chips that were 128KB of memory each, and then used special software to access all 768KB.
As for hard disk storage, the IBM XT with built-in 10MB hard drive was just appearing. So you wrote your dBase II and Basic apps to run on one floppy and store data on another floppy in the other floppy drive.
Human Resources had a 10MB hard drive. It was so valuable that they used ArcServe and thick cables to share its vast contents with several PC's at once.
Digital Resources CP/M was still prevalent in 1983, but in 1984 MSoft's MS-DOS (hastily repackaged operating system from another company -- Pacific Systems?)was quickly becoming the standard O/S for the PC. Mice were a specialized add-on for graphic artists -- the 4-color EGA screen was pretty rare.
So when the Apple Mac came out, it was so far ahead it was hard to compute for most users. (Then again the earlier Apple Lisa was in some ways even more advanced!) VisiOn for Windows was another WIMP system. But in an average 256KB (or 128KB for the Mac) of memory, it was hard to run more than one real program, so few users could see the point of mousing or copying and pasting. And MSoft pre-announced a downright weird-looking Windows, with tiled non-overlapping windows and menus at the bottom.
I could go on...
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As for the style, back in 1984 nearly all SF was the all-knowing scientists in a great future. Gibson and the other so-called cyberpunk writers (collected in Bruce Sterling's "Mirrorshaded") rebelled against that. These days everyone expects the future to be grimy and street-wise and vaguely dystopian, but that's because of the impact of the book (and of course "Blade Runner"). Gibson's quote "The street finds its own uses for technology" has become a cliche, but he wrote it.
As for the lack of action, surely the ringing phones from wintermute made the hair on the back of your neck stand on end? Or try out the last brief quote here
I maintain the complete bibliography, so I'm biased, but the Nebula, Hugo, Philip K. Dick, Seiun, and Ditmar awards for Neuromancer mean something.
Gibson's later work is weak, but for most readers Burning Chrome - Neuromancer - Count Zero - Mona Lisa Overdrive is a sensational ride.
As for the movie, who knows. Neuromancer is a pretty resilient story and worked well as an audiobook and graphic novel, but there's a lot of ways they could screw it up.
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Even Abel Ferrara and some cool actors couldn't rescue Gibson's "New Rose Hotel".
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0133122
I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Doesn't bode well for the Neuromancer movie.
Now, a movie of Jeff Noon's "Vurt", now that's an entirely different proposition. Kind of Trainspotting-meets-The Matrix.
Da Blog
Umm...! To my knowledge Chris Cunningham directed the original Hellraiser movie. If that isn't an example of quality horror/sci-fi cinema, then I don't know what is.
You're exactly right when you say Snow Crash is comedy, and comparing it to something as serious as Neuromancer is absurd. The strange thing is, almost every review I've ever read of Snow Crash does exactly that, and usually ends up panning Snow Crash for being "unrealistic", or having "absurd characters" like Raven. God, he's a giant mutant, who throws harpoons and uses glass knives, and has a nuclear bomb wired to his head. How could that not be humor?