I can’t help but believe it will get screwed up. But I hope they keep the protagonist’s name ;-)
What’s the name? I haven’t read the book.
So the box of my copy of the Interplay adventure/RPG wasn’t lying after all!
Well at least the guy adapting it seems to have a measure of respect for the source material (unlike, say, the people who raped I Robot,) so there’s a chance it’ll be good.
When Johnny Mnemonic was in production I told a friend, “William Gibson wrote the screenplay! There’s no way this will fail!”
TRUE STORY
Case.
Technology and consumers have matured so much since that book was written that I can’t see how it could be produced now as anything other than camp.
How so? I re-read the book recently, and was pleasantly surprised how well it had aged.
As long as they don’t use the old script where Case over comes everything THROUGH THE POWER OF LOVE.
To be fair, I, Robot had nothing to do with the Asimov book until the studio suits decided to slap the title on the nearly complete film late in production.
I actually talked to Vincenzo Natali briefly about Neuromancer at a Splice screening last year. He really does have great reverence for the material and is nervous as hell about adapting it, but feels that he can do it justice with the right approach. Besides, better him than someone who has no idea who Gibson is or why Neuromancer is significant.
Seems to me the trick with a Neuromancer film at this point is finding a way to not instantly make the mass audience think it’s a Matrix ripoff. The old WarCraft/Starcraft/Warhammer/40k problem.
I bet they give Case some mad kung fu skills or something. I could see the suits deciding that the protagonist being completely inept at defending himself wouldn’t play well with the kids.
I can see that happening, even though it would make Molly basically pointless. Noir protagonists get the shit beat out of them regularly, not that you can expect studio heads to know that.
Still, Natali has gotten some ridiculous stuff made without much studio interference, so maybe they’ll leave him alone to do his thing.
Mainly, everyone now knows that cyberspace – aka the Internet – does not work that way. Heck, Neuromancer was borderline silly the day it was published to people who knew anything about computers.
It’s kind of like that awful scene in A.I. where they go visit “Dr. Know” instead of just using Google. Now base an entire movie around concepts that dated.
Neuromancer has one of the greatest opening lines, which interestingly is now an anachronism:
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
You mean, the sky was blue? :)
Funny, I always assumed that was referring to static, so a gray sky.
Yay, I finally got my turn! I still don’t get it though.
You don’t really get “static” channels anymore.
True, so what amuses me is the fact that right now, if I tune my TV input to a dead (or nonexistent) channel, I will see a pure blue screen. So he could have been right.
You can’t seriously be this dense.
When Neuromancer was written, TVs displayed static on vacant channels. TVs don’t do that anymore. Thus, the original intended meaning of the sentence has been changed by advances in technology.
Understand now?