Yet another Hacker News

The 42-Year Journey to Bring 'Neuromancer' to the Screen

44 points Brajeshwar 1 hour ago 20 comments

EbNar 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah, maybe I will finally able to understand what that book was about.

icedchai 19 minutes ago | parent

I started reading it as a teenager and found it essentially unreadable, and quickly moved on to something else. I wonder if I'd find it any better as an adult...

the_real_cher 52 minutes ago | parent

I hope real true fans and talented people that make, produce, and direct it and it's not just a cash grab like so many modern nostalgia works (Star Wars, Rings of Power, etc.).

EvanAnderson 30 minutes ago | parent

Same here.

I really hope the industry keeps its grubby mitts off "Snow Crash". As far as I'm concerned it could only ever be made as an epic Japanese-style animation (which the industry would never do).

Arubis 11 minutes ago | parent

Hard agree. Both Neuromancer and Snow Crash were formative, but the latter feels like it would be damaged by trying to film it, where the former has so deeply informed what film even means for so many decades that it seems more likely to survive.

I wouldn't even assume that someone bringing Snow Crash to the screen would get that it's supposed to make you laugh.

Joel_Mckay 28 minutes ago | parent

Neuromancer is a classic, and given the popular genre it shouldn't get too cheesy. Yet, after Murderbot I would remain cautiously optimistic. ymmv =3

misnome 21 minutes ago | parent

It was okay, but was a bit disappointing changing the colonists from competent space hippies, into incompetent space hippies. The weird digression from the book at the 2/3 mark of the season seemed purely to try to contort the story back around this unnecessary change.

Joel_Mckay 7 minutes ago | parent

The production brought some serious talent like Alexander Skarsgård, Noma Dumezweni, and David Dastmalchian. Sci-fi comedic drama is always difficult to do well, and I agree trying to glue on the PC subplots stood out too much. =3

world2vec 33 minutes ago | parent

I'm hyped for this, hope it makes justice to the book. The cast looks spot on, let's see how they imagined Freeside, Chiba and my favourite: the orbital Rastafarian colony Zion.

Frothacker 30 minutes ago | parent

I hope it's really good.

abcd_f 29 minutes ago | parent

Neuromancer is my favorite book. Not one of, but the one.

After watching the trailer I must say that the overall vibe is substantially off. Very pretty, but it lacks the perpetually disoriented, if you will, atmosphere that dominates the narration in the book. It's all too clean and predictable in the trailer.

But it is a difficult book to adapt, I will give them that.

rtkwe 27 minutes ago | parent

The best books usually are quite difficult to adapt. It's a lot easier to give characters internality because you can just say what they're thinking in a book quickly in a way that's jarring in a show or movie. I can't remember the last time I heard an internal dialog on a show.

tgv 5 minutes ago | parent

Simple: if it proves too difficult, don't do it.

I watched the trailer, and it doesn't mesh with anything I remember from the book. As the GP says, the book is disorienting. Not because of internal monologue, but because of the language. It places new words in essential places, where you can't really parse the sentence, and have to form some sort of impression. The rest of the imagery has been done to death. Some bits from the trailer looked a lot like Blade Runner. But the neologisms, feeling out of depth, that's an essential part of the book, never done in movies AFAIK, and I don't see it in the trailer.

ldmosquera 5 minutes ago | parent

Dexter had the best internal dialog I can remember; it's like the protagonist had two greatly contrasting personalities (his outward demeanor and then his internal dialog) which were constantly riffing off each other on screen, though it never got in the way. Just pitch perfect throughout.

For a show where the internal dialog eventually does become a bit annoying, look at You (in my mind, greatly inspired by Dexter).

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7335184/

noir_lord 10 minutes ago | parent

Trailer doesn't match the way I pictured it when I read it as a kid (which wasn't that long after it was published).

That's fine, that's usually the case, few adaptations get close to what you build in your head (The Expanse did, it pretty much nailed that which is I suspect why I liked it so much) but yeah, the world looks too clean.

thenthenthen 9 minutes ago | parent

Trailer here: https://youtu.be/g79GPZSQHBk?si=pKhadWftcz8WMjyW

Waaaaaay to clean. The video started in 240p and looked promising but no. Also whatsup with the Gaspar Noe title screens

FLeXMurphy 20 minutes ago | parent

Skipped the Foundation, will skip this too most likely.

rhyperior 12 minutes ago | parent

Foundation (on AppleTV) is simply a different story set in a similar universe. It’s a good story, worth watching imo.

phillennium 11 minutes ago | parent

I've read Neuromancer and liked it back in 2002, as a teenager. And whenever rumors about an adaptation came up, I was curious.

So in that 42-year journey I'm along for 24 years, more than half.

I think the adaptation will probably be neither a masterpiece nor a flop. So... kinda anticlimactic: wait for 24 years and get some "middle ground" that will be mostly forgotten in the end.

But still, it's interesting for me to see it. Because Gibson dreamed the cyberpunk, and we kinda live it. AI is one of the main characters in Neuromancer. And AI is what we talk about all day nowadays. Of course, there's a world of difference between his vision and our reality... But the more interesting it is to compare.