I don't know ... Neuromancer is amazing and groundbreaking. Will they do it justice? Having the show creator being most known for writing on Lost is .................. not inspiring to say the least. Plus the adaptation on Apple TV+ of Foundation was god awful. I'm not holding out much hope for this one. Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.
There's a sad irony to the world's largest company producing a sci-fi dystopian drama. It's the same feeling I get watching Rings of Power, where the CGI is nice and some of the costumes are cool, but the sterile writing and direction completely undermines it. Money can buy you a lot of nice things, but good television needs to be inspired. Apple has the largest savior complex out of everyone in FAANG, and I'm not sure if that's the healthiest way to approach this book. Maybe it'll turn out great though, which might even be more ironic.
It's a real phenomena and I'm not sure why it's happening. Every time without fail, the writer's are always uninterested in the source material and mostly known for some imitation of a not so great show.
If you're spending literal billions, why not hire a big shot writer who can actually work with the source material instead of shoe horning their fringe political opinions?
because the "shoehorned political opinions" are not coming from the writer, are coming from market research done by the executives. they will not risk their investment by hiring a writer known for taking risks and having a vision, which ironically is what dooms the product to mediocrity
Given the way most of these politicised productions have been underperforming and sometimes even crashing this seems to be unlikely. It is not the market which demands this type of programming but more likely to be an outflow of the focus on ESG by certain investment companies which will eventually find out their investments tend to loose value if they insist on pushing a political agenda before profitability. These companies are not dealing with their own money so they hold a fiduciary duty towards their clients who are, by and large, not in it for pushing politics. Once their investments start tanking they'll start looking for someone to blame and sue which is when Blackrock, Vantage and the other investment companies pushing ESG will start to feel the heat.
I thought this at first too, but actual market research shows that real "woke" opinions are about as rare as facist ones. If they did market research, I think they mistook the loud minority on twitter and the internet in general for their larger viewer base. I can't prove my ideas, but I can certainly see Disney losing billions, their CEO leaving and their stock crashing.
I haven’t (yet) watched Twin Peaks but I’d wholeheartedly concur with that endorsement. For quality / episode ratio, I’d put it up there with the first four seasons of the Wire (10/10).
The first episode of Severance is quite slow with regards to plot but still visually compelling. The cinematography, music and character building stay consistently excellent throughout the series but the drama and tension increasingly ramp up so much that my wife and I were on the edge of our seats for the last few episodes. It was so good that I intend to re-watch Season One before watching Season Two (I’m guessing that there will be follow-up) comes out.
My wife and I both really enjoyed the first two seasons of For All Mankind. She generally dislikes science fiction and anything to do with space but was soon won over by the human element and the great characters. However, we both felt that the quality of the show (particularly the writing) fell hard with the third season.
We both also thought that Shining Girls was an excellent mini-series and have Slow Horses lined up to watch next.
I agree. Of all the TV I've watched in recent memory, I continue to think about Severance all the time. To think I only watched it because of the Parks n' Rec guy!
Slow Horses too, that's ace. Mythic Quest has been a surprisingly good watch with some proper brilliant moments. Jason the Mammal in See is pretty good.
S02E04 that came out today (Friday) had me uttering "He's so fucking good" out loud, despite being alone in the apartment. About Gary Oldman, that is. The way he hates absolutely everyone and cares about nothing, while showing that he deeply cares about his employees/Joes and justice. It's all there in the writing too, of course. There's just something about the way Gary Oldman portrays it that gives it an extra layer of authenticity. The man can act.
Severance is great, but it sure felt to me like a send up of Apple’s own corporate culture with some mid century IBM thrown in. I wonder how Ben Stiller was able to nail the vibe so well as someone who hasn’t spent time as a worker in a place like that. It’s uncanny.
It’s seems the show has a truly exceptional team, they collectively nailed it. Everything is sublime: the writing, the cast, the acting, the sets and locations, the cinematography, the music, even the opening credits. So it doesn’t surprise me that they nailed that weird blend of retro and modern corporate culture
And that final episode of season 1, my god that's some of the best multi-strand story telling I've ever seen in any form. Even Thelma Schoonmaker couldn't have edited that better.
Agreed, it was another level. My only fear is that there’s no way they can pull this off twice. I just hope they can get near to season 1’s brilliance with season 2
I've heard good things, I look forward to torr- I mean paying for a subscription of Apple TV+ to check it out!
On a more serious note, I'm open to the idea it could be great. I hate HBO and their business model, but I'll be damned if they didn't use their power to make some phenomenal television. That being said, the irony is more in the context of the source material, rather than how good or bad the show might be. At the very least, Rings of Power doesn't portray a Numenorean package fulfillment center...
RoP's cardinal sin was that it was boring. HotD and Andor are both examples of megacorporations producing art that resonates with humans in 2022. RoP didn't have to suck.
I don't get the positive reception I'm reading about Andor here.
I've watched it since I've seen it mentioned in positive light multiple times - the rebellion plotline is nice but main character development is super dragged out and feels pointless - the arduous childhood flashbacks, dramatic sister searching - to end up screwing in Miami - so many episodes felt weak and irrelevant. The heist was dragged out far too much - who cares what sw goat milk tastes like ?
Entire season could be condensed into a one and a half hour movie and nothing of value would be lost.
Not saying it's bad - but far from "the wire in SW universe" or other praises people seem to be singing it.
It's made up of three arcs and the first arc is bad. No way around that. It doesn't set up any themes or have any payoffs, it's just a boring slog. However, the spycraft and prison stuff was the most engaging thing Disney's ever put on a screen.
Yeah but it wasn't worth the two hours of setup. Considering where they end the season I really feel like they wasted not setting up stronger themes and motifs. It could have had some juicy payoff.
I agree on the flashbacks, but they were IMO the only weak part of the series. The costumes, music, sets, cinematography, writing, and acting were all superb. And it built up into a culmination at the end that tied everything together, without wasting previous setups.
Also, the bittersweet sense of sacrifice and hope shining through a tsunami of oppression is so relevant and positive compared to so much of the pointlessly dark series out there.
Did you finish the season? It gets progressively more tense and entertaining.
I don't know. RoP engaged me more than HotD--not that it was great. I'll probably give HotD another shot starting at the beginning over the holidays. I'm liking Andor more than I liked either of those. Disney has mostly done at least a B/B+ job with Star Wars overall.
I too like Rings Of Power, it was one of the few shows I'd anticipate watching the next one. It had heart, some mystery and some fun characters. I'm a sucker for that music too (Bear McCredy). better than I hoped.
Andor was compelling and very Star Wars. HotD lost me, I didn't make it through. It seemed kinda soap opera. People are raving about Severence, I watched it, and though decent, but didn't have the positive reaction others in this thread had. Though I'm old and have had time working for the big co under my belt, which may have skewed things.
But I guess everyones different tastes are why they're making so many shows...
Unfortunately Disney burned a lot of people due to their other offerings, so the public is ignoring the genius that is Andor. I credit the show's quality to Disney keeping their dirty mouse mits off of Gilroy and team.
I think they simply burned people out on Star Wars. Too much too fast. The 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' got media executives thinking that the public have an infinite appetite for their favorite multimedia franchises, but I think they're now discovering the limits of that appetite.
I agree, in an alternative universe with a different director (maybe even a different edit), the show could probably be pretty good. HotD was good, but frankly it's a capitalization on how god-awful GoT's 8th season was. They could have produced a wet shit like Amazon did and it would still be a redemption arc for G.R.R.M's television adaptations.
Andor I haven't seen yet (not a disney guy) but I sorta get the same vibes. Disney, for all their artistic weal and woe, makes a ton of safe and boring films these days. It doesn't really impress me that they can put together an M-rated show that doesn't suck.
Andor is really less of a Disney thing so much as Disney allowing the Gilroy brothers (who were involved with the Jason Bourne series and legal thriller Michael Clayton) create an elaborate espionage show stuffed with sociopolitical commentary and historical allusions, which just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. Others involved with it include people who worked on House of Cards, The Americans, and Black Mirror, so it has that level of pedigree.
It's basically doing to Star Wars what The Wire did to Baltimore.
FWIW I watched Andor on the advice of a friend (I'm also not a Disney guy, nor really a huge Star Wars fan past the originals) and really loved it. The Star Wars tie-ins are a bit besides the point, though the design references are neat. It feels like a movie about an insurgency against Franco, just set in the future.
That's a good point. I'm only part-way through but, so far, you could pretty much take out the various design references to Star Wars and make a few other tweaks and you'd still have a good series not set in the Star Wars universe.
I didn't really dislike the sequels to the original trilogy but they were forced to do way too much fan service.
It's probably no coincidence that the best entrants in the universe in the modern era are probably Rogue One and the Mandalorian which in spite of very obvious tie-in are mostly unrelated to the original series.
Thanks for that recommendation. It sounds like Andor should be worth watching.
I was totally sceptical about new Star Wars shows when Rogue One came out and had no interest in going to see it. However, I ended up watching it while I was tired (but not able to sleep) on a long-haul flight. To my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed it as a solid adventure film and I watched it again a year or two later on Disney+.
Do yourself a favor and watch Andor. It’s the least Disney-ish Star Wars property there is since they bought the IP, and the first time I’ve truly liked Star Wars since I was a kid reading the Thrawn trilogy.
I heard so much hype on Andor. I watched the first ep. I just find I'm no longer interested in Star Wars. Studdering androids/robots make no sense. Same with a world with all the tech around and yet people living in tipis.
I feel a similar sentiment, but since that sentiment sells ( see Bill Hicks on advertising dollar[1] ), company might dial down the usual propaganda in lieu of actual customer satisfaction. If you are looking for more recent example, check Amazon's "Expanse". It is very anti-corporate space opera and came from a company that is likely to eventually put ads in orbit.
edit: I will add one more thought. Assuming it is a decent adaptation, it may introduce a younger generation to what risks some people predicted in our developing society. At the very least, it may get them interested.
It’s clear by the ratings that The Peripheral, based on Gibson, but also an AmazonVideo product, has Rings of Power beat by a significant margin. And “The P” was the underdog here. So theres a chance that AppleTV+ (as well as AV) will learn from that and steer clear of the more obvious mistakes.
IIRC Gibson stated that Neuromancer is basically "un-movieable". I love the book and the rest of the Sprawl series but man. Neuromancer is a SUPER busy book with a lot going on. And I just think in today's world it would be hard to really capture the vibe AND have a good plot that isn't convoluted.
But I am with you. Hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
Eh, as I said last time we had a Neuromancer adaptation news story, Dune was said to be unfilmable for years until Villeneuve went and did it and made it seem both natural and almost a little bit conventional.
We're in a golden age of IP right now, and now that superheroes are getting a bit tired, perhaps it's time for classic sci-fi adaptations to shine.
As someone who didn't read the book, the dune adaptation felt pretty hollow. A lot of visual splendor, but a very thin story with very empty characters. Extremely shallow interactions.
The protagonist is basically an aspergers teen under a great deal of pressure, including multiple murder attempts against himself and his family and friends. He also happens to have visions of the future. Before he gets marooned into a planet made out of psychedelic dust.
Considering that, I think the interactions were too articulate. Trainspotting was Dune with less drugs and internal conflict.
The books have notoriously rich plots, which is why they were deemed unfilmable.
There was a lot left unsaid in the film to keep it concise and uncomplicated for a viewer like you who hasn't read the books. (Perhaps it was an overcorrection.) The director would occasionally reduce a long meandering sideplot to a quick distrustful glance from one of the characters. Someone who's read the book would pick up on it and feel like it did the book justice by acknowledging those events rather than cutting them out entirely, and the film doesn't burden viewers who haven't read the book with an impossibly hard to follow plot crammed into 2 hours.
I don't disagree. As I mention in my earlier comment, the point is that what was once considered unfilmable has now actually gotten adaptations, even if the adaptations might not be good.
And what might be attempted once might receive adaptations again, until someone gets it right.
I always interpreted it as "unable to be adapted faithfully."
For instance, in my earlier post I mentioned the live-action Ghost in the Shell, which in some parts Hollywood almost-mechanically adapted to be shot by shot identical to the original animated film, while completely missing the point with the racebent casting choices and much of the writing. I would count that as a poor adaptation, but not adapted so faithlessly that it has no resemblance to the original work.
Then again, Blade Runner is a loose adaptation of PKD's original story, yet does its central themes justice. So I guess "unflimable" is a relative term. Maybe it could ALSO just mean "no demand or desire to see adapted for film or television."
My overall point is that it's a golden age of IP and with the mainstreaming of nerd culture (and the endless demand for content from the streaming studios), all sorts of works that were once considered unfilmable are about to see the light of day.
"Unfilmable" for me is James Tiptree Jr.'s "Up the Walls of the World". Half the novella is spent on a gas giant inhabited by giant telepathic manta rays farting jet fire. The other half is spent in the <body> of a solar-system spanning semi-material, invisible/ dark <creature-ship-machine> where all the protagonists are transferred as disembodied minds. The day is saved by a strong telekinetic/ telepathic computer programmer who merges with the <beast-thing-machine-of-the-stars> and a spontaneously arisen AI from Earth (early '70s too... It Came From The Mainframe).
The movie doesn't even cover the full plot of the first book. I'd say the first 3 books are easier to adapt to screen, God Emperor later becomes impossible to adapt cause most of the book is internal monologues.
I think it's supposed to be part 1 of a longer series of movies. While I haven't read the book(s?) in ages, I can remember that there's a LOT more that needs to happen.
He did it, but still would have a preferred a Dune TV show, especially after the success of GoT, and the streaming wars. The money was there. Characters played by Jason Momoa, Oscar Issac etc only got a little bit of screen time. And all those cool characters would have been amazing to watch over a few seasons.
Well yeah it was officially green lit in October but I doubt he'd have even started if they hadn't promised him something along the lines. The ending is terrible at this point. How would that look on Master Villeneuve's vita?
I also doubt they'll go for 3 because all following books don't have that kind of action flick / visual extravaganza potential and this is what Villeneuve can do. Instead there is a lot of talk and this is what Villeneuve can't do. It'll still be the same ol' Dune with a lot of chamber play. I doubt he's even seriously interested in that.
I dunno, I think Messiah works as an ending to the trilogy. There's quite a bit of intrigue and action. Nothing gets too weird—Duncan's Ghola is the only new sci-fi addition.
Children takes a sharp turn with the whole possession thing and then Leto's metamorphosis. But Messiah is quite adaptable and is the real ending for many of the same characters as Book 1.
> Dune was said to be unfilmable for years until Villeneuve went and did
I always assumed this argument goes for the whole of the original Dune universe.
The first book is pretty straight forward and easy to understand. The further on you go with them, the more problematic it becomes as it is mainly dialogue and not much is really happening.
Neuromancer is far more challenging than the first books of Dune and I doubt from what Villeneuve did to the first book that he'd be capable of going even half way without gutting it of all the really interesting parts. This one felt pretty shallow already.
It's been some time since I read it, but I would think the most challenging aspect of Neuromance would be in the visuals. If done well, they'd convey a good chunk of the book's worldbuilding and other descriptions, leaving mostly the characters and the heist.
I think the bigger challenge is that it's been partially adapted so many times already by inspiring so many shows and movies over the decades that the actual adaption would seem derivative and like treading old ground. Therefore, how do you make it it's own thing while respecting the source material.
I agree totally with your argument regarding the visuals. Judging from the Foundation though, I'm pretty optimistic they can manage that. They seem to be willing to through serious cash at their shows. It doesn't always mean something as we have seen with the Super Hero Hype but they did a wonderful thing with the Foundation visually.
However I'm not sure about the characters, their development and their emotional structures. You should read the book(s) again and watch out for the style in which Gibson build them. The books are a great re-read. I'll go for it myself once I'm finished with my current read.
> Neuromancer is far more challenging than the first books of Dune.
How so? I'd expect that with both reality turning more and more cyberpunk, and the revived interest in the retrofuturistic '80s-early '90s form of the genre with Cyberpunk 2077 and its Netflix anime adaptation, audiences are primed for this sort of thing.
What you are talking about is the visual experience. In my opinion, this will be mostly a problem BECAUSE the visuals have been there already. All of those movies following Blade Runner did their part of the Neuromancer-Cyberpunk thing.
However I consider the hardest part being the emotional depth of the characters which get their unique taste through the authors way to describe them. The Burroughesque touch and the unknowns is what makes Gibsons early works truly special (it gets easier with his latests works as we can see with the current adaptation of Peripheral). The show needs a true artists touch. It doesn't have to be what Gibson did but it should be something special, not mainstream.
Dune on the other hand is a straight forward dynasty drama at the beginning and only later escalates into a philosophical exercise later on before it explodes into something completely different towards the end (of the original books).
The beginning has been done already in Game of Thrones for example and is pretty much doable.
Neuromancer is harder but I think Apple can pull this off because I feel this brave approach from them. A feeling I had with Netflix at the beginning.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel".
Please explain how you make that imagery work in a way that's accessible to the old-school 80's crowd along with the younger folks who have no clue what that reference means.
They absolutely have to get that right. No one wants to see Johnny Mnemonic again. In the first chapter, Case can't jack in because his brain was wrecked by the Russian mycotoxin. The lazy thing to do is explain that by having him dump expositiory dialog out of his mouth. The hard thing to do is actually show how jacking in works, but you can't just rehash the classic 1982 Tron style visuals one more time. A fresh approach is what's needed, a vision that's futuristic but also gets the retro part right.
I'm not saying Johnny Mnemonic is bad, just that it dates itself to the 90's so obviously these days. Same with Virtuosity, which I think is a very underrated movie.
In particular I really liked Henry Rollins' performance. It was the one thing they got just right.
> retrofuturistic '80s-early '90s form of the genre
I really hope this is the direction they don't go. Cyberpunk should be a forward-looking critique of modern society, not retro-futuristic trope-baiting.
On one hand there's too much '80s nostalgiabait media, in large part influenced by the success of Stranger Things, perhaps, to the point that the faux-period piece style starts to look cliche.
On the other, a proper Neuromancer adaptation should definitely have a lavishly ethereal synthwave soundtrack, and probably should have the future tech not include cyberpunk versions of smartphones. Also the world-building ought to have anachronistic details like the Soviet Union floating around in the background.
What is "modern society" these days? We just came out of a presidency of a guy who's stuck in the 80s and we're moving towards a new Cold War era. Meanwhile the clothing styles look like this: https://thevou.com/fashion/current-fashion-trends/
He didn't make it seem natural, he made it seem neutral. I have no idea why, but he left out key information and incredibly important interpersonal scenes and focused instead on big army scenes.
> IIRC Gibson stated that Neuromancer is basically "un-movieable".
Honestly, I'd have to disagree. As far as novels go, it's actually fairly amenable to a film or TV adaptation -- the storyline is linear and follows a single main character with clear motivations, and the storytelling doesn't rely too heavily on internal monologue or implicit knowledge. It's perhaps a little too dense for a feature film, but as a TV series it'd be perfectly fine.
Some of the technical aspects of the story might make it more difficult to adapt -- like the scenes set in orbit, or in cyberspace -- but that's no longer the insurmountable obstacle it used to be. The Expanse had no problem realistically depicting scenes set in space, for example.
I was part of a group interview with Gibson years ago, and I didn't fully appreciate one of the things he said at the time until years later.
It was something about how everyone who loves a written story gets a very specific, vivid, custom image in their head of what it would be like to see it on screen. It can be so powerful that it's easy to forget that different people can come away with very different versions, based on what elements of the story resonated with them. He said this is why movie versions of beloved stories often get massive negative reactions.
For example, the Neuromancer in my head is a very gritty, 80s angular dark geometry highlighted in neon, Blade-Runner-esque film. It certainly doesn't have any comic relief in it. Most people I've talked to seem to have at least a vaguely similar vision.
I always thought it was a little weird that nearly every adaptation of his work was fairly light-hearted, even self-parodying in places. "Gibson must have the worst luck at being paired with screenwriters" was how I thought of it. The Neuromancer computer game, the film version of Johnny Mnemonic, his X-Files episodes, they all try to lighten things up.
A few years after his comment, I went back and re-read Neuromancer and Burning Chrome and realized the intended comic relief was there all along. The "Aryan reggae band". The space station full of Rastafarians (the implication being they're so high they're in outer space). The dolphin with a SQUID. Case running out of tanning lotion. etc. etc.
There are probably roughly just as many people that focus on that aspect of his work as the "looks like Blade Runner in my head" crowd. The people making this version can onlt make one version, so which do they go with?
I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out, but I expect the result will be very polarizing.
The Peripheral is also super busy, every sentence dense with information and revealing cultural context. But it does read as filmable.
The adaption on Prime is worth watching, but it's a rewrite. None of the language or density of expression is there. They probably made it more comprehensible and I won't criticize that. But the books were invigorating and mind blowing.
I just watched the Foundation adaptation and thought it was a pretty darned good TV show. It had a reasonable compelling plotline, compelling world building, and interesting takes on how technology could lead to strange social dynamics.
Yes, I'm sure it wasn't the same as the books (though I haven't read any of those in my adult life), but taken on its own it was a good show.
I think the Robot novels have the most modern potential, particularly if they focus on Solarian society (I think many people may find uncomfortable parallels to present social trends.)
It was ok in the first half, but as the season wore on they started to rely on the magic chosen one troupe instead of something closer to hard science like the Expanse. This is yet another show where the plot suffers from the metaphor and symbolism being inserted
>though I haven't read any of those in my adult life
You should read the first three (chronological release). They're short and sweet.
I got about two episodes into Apple-Foundation and threw in the towel. It is a good show. However the problem is not that it's 'not the same as the book'. The show takes beloved characters and alters them a great deal to teach viewers tired lessons about progressive values. I don't even disagree with the lessons! It aligns right on my beliefs! But it just reminds me of stuff that was exciting in the original books and that I'm not watching a instant-classic adaptation of a classic book.
Instead I'm watching a half-decent Apple original wrapped in a well-known brand so that it's a safer investment. It's a show I'd probably find engaging and interesting if it didn't remind me over and over of how much I enjoyed the books and how unlike them it is.
It surely is not the books and one character is just annoying but the books are not good TV show material and they did a truly wonderful thing with it. I actually enjoyed what they did with the world. The show is full of stunning moments and there are fantastic characters in it.
I was more happy with what they did to it than what Villeneuve did with Dune and their characters for example.
Neuromancer would be hard to do well as a film. But as fairly short TV series it would be excellent. There is huge potential as well because you could do, say Neuromancer in 4 hours and then do the rest of the trilogy.
The best screen adaptation of a book I know of, Brideshead Revisited from 1981, took the book almost word for word and made a fairly long TV series. Neuromancer and the rest of the trilogy could be done the same way.
e.g. I was not holding out much hope when "Damon Lindelof producer of Lost, decided what we really needed was for him to create a new TV series in the Watchman universe"
Whether Neuromancer works out, I have no idea.
There's no end of money being wasted by the streamers on prestigious properties - but occasionally you'll get a Watchmen or Good Omens or Sandman.
Other positive is that we're living in a time where these can be "done justice".
If it needs to cost $15M an hour to make and run for 10 hours to tell the story properly - well it now can be made.
It might not be told well, it might make bile spew from my very core - but somebody can have a crack at it.
> I was not holding out much hope when "Damon Lindelof producer of Lost, decided what we really needed was for him to create a new TV series in the Watchman universe"
Well, Lindelof was also the showrunner for The Leftovers, which was a profoundly moving and well-made show. He also co-wrote the Alien prequel Prometheus. I wasn't too surprised that his Watchmen show was good!
Anyway, as for Neuromancer... Graham Roland was showrunner for Dark Winds, which was pretty solid, so maybe that bodes well. On the other hand, his writing work on Lost was entirely just on the final season, which was a nonsensical mess, so who knows.
It (probably) was groundbreaking. Is it amazing though? I tried reading it recently, it read like a generic pulp novel. After 100 pages, I saw no reason to continue.
That's why I wrote it was definitely groundbreaking (at least as far as I know). As far as an timeless piece of great literature, it definitely isn't. It's just a generic gangster/underworld story with forgettable characters.
First time I read it on https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_c100-444.php and it was great. A couple years ago I reread it and it was still good. But can say that it is not easy to read.
Daemon and Freedom should be easy to adapt, they read like a script to an action movie already!
Those are real page-turners, hard to put down once you start them.
But if their adaptation of Foundation is a sign of things to come, we should hope it's not Apple TV+ that is going to produce any of these movies/series. Yes, that's what I really came to say here, they gave Foundation to some movie industry bureaucrats that A/B tested the storyline on some Joe Hillbillies and completely butchered the genius of Asimovs novels.
I guess I'm Joe Hillbilly, because I loved the Foundation tv series. No, it's not a faithful reproduction of the books, and I couldn't care less about that. I can love both and not get bent out of shape, especially since the books would make a pretty crappy tv show.
But if there's only the southwest resemblance between the two (eg World War Z) then it's just a stupid money grab and why not make a new universe for the story to exist in? It would lead to better franchising opportunities when there aren't books to compete with.
I see no problem with a screenwriter taking inspiration from a book but taking it in a different direction to adapt it for a different media (and perhaps time). Honestly, I find the fans who can't tolerate one deviance from their bible tiresome.
What are your precise criticisms about the adaptation?
I am seriously unsure of whether I like it or not. Some ways in which I have gone back and forth:
- It's visually on point (I think) in conveying the vastness of Asimov's imagined Galaxy.
- The storyline is bent out of shape; but not enough to make it seem like a totally different series.
- Then again, Salvor Hardin's character and others are much more action-oriented whereas in the books they are depicted as thinking and strategizing a lot more (from what I can remember, I really need to re-read the books).
So I don't really have any substantive criticisms apart from a vague feeling of "this could have been better". Do you?
I didn't finish the TV show (I got maybe halfway through), but my main problem was the changes to Hardin. In the book, Hardin is a shrewd politician, and there's nothing magical or blessed about him. He "defeats" Anacreon by exploiting their own dim beliefs in magic against them. In the TV show, Hardin is a warrior with a special "magical" connection to the Vault. That conveys a very different, almost contradictory message compared to the book.
I love recommending Daemon to people, if I know they don't mind imagery of a bit of violence, gore, drug use... I've been a fan of his ever since he was Leinad Zeraus, self-publishing Daemon. (I think I have a physical copy with that name on it?)
> Pleasepleaseplease someone make "Daemon" and "Freedom™" by Daniel Suarez.
Wonderful books but I wonder who would be able to turn them into a decent series. At some point there was a plan to turn Daemon into a movie but that never happened, probably for the best.
I don't know Viking, after seeing what happened to Foundation...
So, I mean, I know that not everyone loves The Lord of the Rings movies. But I just need everyone to remember that Peter Jackson did them. And I mean, I thought Heavenly Creatures was really interesting, and I think I'm one of the dozens of people who really liked The Frighteners (yes, I'm a hipster Frighteners fan.) But if you'd asked me, "Viking, should we trust Peter Jackson to make 11 hours and 21 minutes of The Lord of the Rings (extended editions)?" I would have said, "No," and I would have, in my humble opinion, been totally completely wrong.
I mean, I just need to remind people that great movies exist. LA Confidential. The Matrix. Hell, even the Fugitive is a lot of fun (for what it is.) Mr. Robot is simultaneously amazing and also boring as shit for huge stretches - but man, they committed to that vision, and when the big moments hit, they hit hard. True Lies. True Romance. The Abyss. The Fisher King. Good Will Hunting. Inglourious Basterds. Hell, even Hackers. And Sneakers. La Femme Nikita. Lola Rennt. Bourne Identity. BBC Sherlock (seasons 1-3).
I think Daemon and Freedom could be done wonderfully.
Just imagine ending the series with a nice cackle...
Hard military sci-fi as a TV series? It can only disappoint. Give it a decade or so until the current trend of making everything as palatable as possible to as broad an audience as possible has died and people start making things that they feel work for the source material again.
To me, each Honor Harrington book felt like a really long episode of the best Star Trek : The Next Generation. It just felt so... great... to be reading about a ruthlessly brilliant leader who inspired the people around her to be the best they could be.
Given that "Daemon" and "Freedom™" have sort of a negative portrayal of self-driving vehicles and AR/VR, it would probably not be in big tech's best interests to adapt them. But one can hope!
A new Silicon Valley tech company made the Nebula Device, based on the dystopian novel, "Please God, No One Ever Make The Nebula Device." Available in stores for Christmas!
It's so funny to me, because I love the books, and I believe John C. Wright would absolutely despise all of my politics. I feel like the College of Hortation is a great idea, and I'm pretty sure he thinks it's the bad guy.
Honestly, I'm not sure a super long adaptation is necessary for Project Hail Mary. I could see all of the major beats getting done in about 2 hours or so. There are chapters with fairly long descriptions of the experiments that could be summed up in just a few seconds of screentime. People who want to see the math can read the book. Part of making a good movie adaptation is realizing that film and print are different media and a fully faithful direct translation rarely works very well. The movie ends up bloated and overly exposition heavy, sometimes forgetting that the audience can see what is going on.
Since this thread has a lot of chatter about all kinds of sci-fi adaptations, I'd like to endorse a show for Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling, which fuses cyberpunk setting and action, transhumanism and the evolution of the species, space colonization, and the rise and fall of human ideological empires based on all of the previous. A story that spans epochs and the entire Solar System.
I'm mumbling into the abyss here, but it would be better if somebody wrote a new story as good as Neuromancer was and developed that into a show instead. There are talented and creative people out there who could imagine new things rather than spending their careers working on existing IP because it's believed to be a safer marketing strategy.
Believing that only sequels, remakes, and adaptations are safe is ironic, because at some point all of the things you think you have to remake were new, unproven ideas.
The trick with adaptations is to tell a story that resonates with contemporary themes using the bones of the source material. For example compare Thanos in the MCU to the character in the comic books. Same name and look, same actions (snapping away half the universe), totally different motivations and context.
This is an incredibly fertile time to be adapting Neuromancer. Private space travel controlled by eccentric billionaires is an actual thing now. Independent AI seems way closer than ever before. Hacking and security are huge topics among governments and technical industries.
Parts of the story have to be updated for base plausibility anyway (4MB of hot RAM). If the show runners do it right, they will update more than just that so that it resonates with us today. That’s a creative achievement too. Heck, a lot of Shakespeare’s plays were adaptations.
Totally understandable. Star Wars might have been created only because Lucas couldn't get the rights to adapt Flash Gordon. Spielberg signed on to Indiana Jones after Lucas told him he had a better idea than simply making a James Bond movie.
Star Wars took many elements from everything, but his core motivation was to make a 'space opera' influenced by the serialized sci-fi adventures of his youth- Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
And Indiana Jones was basically updated adventure serials. The ideas of both were not that original, but the execution was ground breaking. I was also just thinking about how pretty much every blockbuster these days is made as the Phantom Menace was: greensceen, digital backgrounds, digital characters, episodic. The guy basically crafted the blueprint for 50 years of hollywood blockbuster films, especially if you consider his effects work contributions. And he's been mocked and reviled on the internet now for what 20 years?
Just imagine if he had simply gotten the rights to Flash Gordon- his adaptations would have no doubt been good, but science fiction as we know it would be completely altered.
Counterpoint: "Foundation" is unfilmable as-is, and what we got contains some of its DNA while actually being a good sci fi show. It gives me hope that this supposed "Hyperion" adaptation could actually work.
It would make a decent anthology show, but that doesn’t fit the prestige budget they wanted to throw at it. It’s possible that Prelude could have been a better start because it actually had action.
That could have worked. Haven't seen a good sci fi anthology in awhile. "Black Mirror" seemed to have run out of ideas, and "Electric Dreams" was of very uneven quality.
There's a bunch on Netflix right now that I haven't mustered up the interest to watch. "Love, Death & Robots" got a second season, and they also host two different sci-fi horror anthologies for short films from Neill Blomkamp and Guillermo del Toro!
The Blomkamp stuff seemed pretty terrible to me. Love, Death & Robots was hit and miss, with the misses being more regular, but the hits like Zima Blue being transcendent.
Counter-Counterpoint: You're right that Foundation was unfilmable, which is why they were wrong to even attempt it. They should have just written their own story instead of pretending to adapt another, but they're not brave enough for that. Or they knew they weren't good enough writers to come up with a story that stood on its own, without a popular legacy to prop it up.
I will say though, Foundation is more filmable than some of Asimov's other books. The Gods Themselves is truly, utterly, unfilmable.
It was first optioned over 20 years ago, and it’s currently in Bradley Cooper’s hands, supposedly. It was going to be done as a series on Syfy, but now it’s apparently going to be a big studio picture.
I think Prelude to Foundation could of been a nice mini-series, but overall Asimov's works are just too fragmented to hold up to being a series really.
I both loved and hated the Foundation TV show. It inspired me to read the book and it was indeed a very different story.
But I loved the visuals and concept of the show. The Mary Sue thing wasn't even that much of a deal breaker like some modern scifi/fantasy TV. Just the story and characters in general lacked depth.
That space elevator crash in the first episode was very well done, and then some of sfx/practical bits in the last couple of episodes were astoundingly poor.
Yeah the concept and most of the visuals were great. The writing, acting, and storytelling in most areas was really poor. The genetic dynasty storyline was the most interesting part (and apparently not from the book at all).
The best parts of the show (the genetic dynasty part) had almost nothing to do with the books. To be fair, especially the first ones would are very hard to adapt.
LotR and the MCU have shown that when you respect the source material, you get incredible movies which are popular and long lasting. For some reason, Hollywood still thinks they can hire directors and writers who want to put their own spin on things and disrespect both the material and the audience and make adaptions like iRobot and Foundation (among many others) which are simply horrible. Even Steve Jackson fell down this hole with (to me) nearly unwatchable Hobbit trilogy.
It's not about the adaption per se - you always need to make drastic changes to transform one medium into another - it's about understanding what makes the source material great. Instead you have directors who pride themselves on having never read or seen the original. It boggles my brain.
Sometimes it works - think BladeRunner or Children of Men - but for more popular stuff, the first thing producers should do is hire a group of fanboys/fangirls to educate them on what makes a particularly loved story great and what changes would not only be unwelcome, but insulting.
I pretty much agree though I’m not sure I’d trust the fanatics to educate film-makers on what elements of a novel could or should be changed when telling a story in the very different medium of moving pictures. There are too many purists in the world; I probably was one when I was a teenager / young adult.
> you have directors who pride themselves on having never read or seen the original.
That is indeed mind-boggling. I’m curious which directors have taken this approach. Also, if they haven’t read the actual source, what do they use as their source instead? The Wikipedia article, an outline written for them by someone else?
Thanks for the response. While I hadn’t read the novel, I thought Children of Men was an excellent film and your comment had piqued my curiosity of how the film’s story came about. I found the following interview by Film Maker magazine¹:
> Filmmaker: How did you become interested in adapting and then making Children of Men?
> Alfonso Cuarón: It was when I realized that the premise of the book, the premise of infertility and humanity, could serve as a metaphor for the fading sense of hope that I feel humanity has [today]. It was an amazing opportunity.
> Filmmaker: I also read that 9/11 was a motivating factor to wanting to do this.
> Cuarón: Definitely. I was trying to cope with the reality we’re living. Even before September 11th things were changing. The big phenomenon of globalization that started becoming so obvious in the ‘90s was really having a lot of repercussions. That was pretty much what I was trying to explore.
> Filmmaker: Your adaptation of the novel is quite loose. How did you approach your source material?
> Cuarón: Once we decided to do this exploration on the state of things – and you don’t have to go very far to realize that the environment and immigration are pretty much on the top of the list – then we had to craft a story. I had the story I wanted to tell so clear in my head that I was very afraid of reading the book and getting completely confused. I read an abridged version of the book, and Timothy J. Sexton, my writing partner, read the [entire] book. But our whole idea was lets find out what elements are relevant to what we’re doing and lets disregard what we think is irrelevant.
I don’t think I’d call that bragging. It seems more like Cuarón had a set of ideas he wanted to explore and the book was a suitable hook on which to hang them.
That's not so bad. 'Foundation' clearly was not a beat-for-beat recreation of the original work. Anyone trying to do that would have created an abomination anyhow. It took a few interesting pieces from the Asimov work and made an interesting TV show that was IMO visually stunning. I think if we get 'riffs' on the original material and not a retelling of the original that's fine, especially when the original is impossible to recreate cinematically
I think some of their deviations were kinda clever but overall they really lost the thread of what the story was supposed to be about. Also it was plodding and disinteresting.
To be fair, it was almost required to be unrecognizable. The original novels consist mostly of two people in a room, alone, talking to each other. Not exactly workable for a major TV series.
The original "Foundation" novel is a set of short stories that take place decades or more apart, and barely share characters. The second novel is more unified but has a 100-year gap in the middle. They would have been an interesting "tales of" anthology series, but not a great narrative series.
Yeah the book was pretty abstract, a narrator/exposition driven story which doesn't translate well. Not a lot of content for building set pieces and action.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I wish networks/services would stop trying to make safe bets with new screen adaptations of classic books and movies. Some of the worst TV I've watched this year has been adaptations of classic books/movies (Foundation, LOTR) and some of the best has been new content (Severance, Raised by Wolves, House of the Dragon).
House of the Dragon was based on Fire and Blood, and I thought was much worse than LOTR. I felt like I was duped into watching Downtown Abbey with dragons.
Foundation was unwatchable but I liked LOTR. Not perfect but Galadriel's storyline was well done and nice to a female hero in a series that typically leaves them to the background.
Check out Serpent Queen. It's the girl-power-scheming-medieval-court-drama that HoD wishes it was. No dragons I guess, but they were hardly in HoD either.
I believe it depends on the demography, I, for one, am tired of seeing things I grew up with being ruined by poor writing and/or low interest in keeping the source material as a pivotal element of the narration.
Few examples
- Foundation wasn't bad per se, if it was marketed as fan fiction. As an adaptation of Asimov's works it's really bad and also chose a timeline that's totally unsatisfying for everybody, both newcomers and book fans. Starting from "Prelude to Foundation" was a much better idea to set up the stage for future story development and as an introduction to the characters.
- Rings of Power, same sin: it isn't Tolkien, it is a fan fiction with some actors cosplaying Tolkien characters that, at its center, portrays a very silly, very boring, romantic story between the female protagonist and the male villain. Teenage good, if the villain was no other than Sauron, AKA "The Lord of the Rings".
- Andor, that I too consider good, is, from an objective POV, just decent. Decent enough in this time and space to stand out compared to the endless list of monstrosities that Disney recently produced especially the Star Wars themed ones, but certainly not a masterpiece, as many have called it.
- Willow: lets' not talk about it. A mediocre movie from the late 80s that has gained a cult status only because, IMO, the video game was reaaaalllyyy good, that had only one reason to be re-adapted to modern times: scrape the bottom of the barrel. It is so bad that you can actually feel sorry for he people who worked at making it.
Neuromancer? I have no hope that they'll make something good, the era of cyber punk hype is long gone, it would already be a miracle to get it back, let alone have an honest adaptation of Gibson's ideas.
During the camberian explosion of the cyber punk movie trope they already tried with Johnny Mnemonic and had to basically rewrite the script from scratch because the book, that was only 10 years ago, had a lot of things that would poorly adapt to 1995, the movie was just ok, with lots of hits and misses, it worked, but it's not memorable.
Neuromancer is 100x harder to adapt and this time it won't be a movie, on real theatrical big screens, but a TV show, on a streaming platform.
There are too many things that could go wrong, to be optimists.
But, there's a big but: William Gibson himself is on board, so I will probably watch it nonetheless.
I had no idea that HoD was not new. I gave up on waiting for new books George RR Martin when he started writing for HBO and seemed to give up on novels. It was at least new to me..
I've thought long and hard about adapting Neuromancer. I think it can be done, but you'd need some liberties. For one, the whole idea of the Tessier-Ashpools would be fascinating if put through the lens of modern billionaires. Like analyzing the Musks and the Bezos of the world who are obsessed with perpetuation of their wealth, of their power, to the point of not actually enjoying their life. I loved the analogy in the book of a nest of wasps, these almost parasitic pests burrowed into their home. You'd have to figure out some way to integrate this into the ending, which I felt was kinda hand-waved in the book.
With a character like Case, you'd need to nail the frenetic energy, like on his last bit of money, strung out, no sleep, basically like a Safdie brothers protagonist. My dream aesthetic would be Safdie brothers + Ridley Scott with a dose of Jóhann Jóhannsson (RIP) for music.
Molly could be interesting if you embrace the street samurai moniker and give her a sort of Yojimbo-esque amusement.
This is a big big change but I'd love it if the Japanese obsession was replaced with a more modern multi-Asian aesthetic. It'd be interesting to blend k-pop and Chinese social media culture into the mix. And make some of the characters Asian-American.
>With a character like Case, you'd need to nail the frenetic energy, like on his last bit of money, strung out, no sleep, basically like a Safdie brothers protagonist.
Miles Teller really doesn't fit this for me, and that's tremendously off-putting. The other people (rumored?) to be involved in putting this together also don't have solid bodies of work, iirc. Totally agree with you on your dream aesthetic.
To me, the casting is sort of impossible. I don't know why, I guess I was in an impressionable age when I read it, but they almost don't feel like any human when reading about them.
My question is, how do you make Neuromancer almost 25 years after The Matrix, which was built on the precepts of Neuromancer, and not just end up with a road-worn Matrix movie?
Or even more banally, after Netflix's Altered Carbon, which I've only seen an episode or two of, yet it so easily encapsulates the platonic ideal of what a gritty cyberpunk show should look and feel like, to the point of banality? I'm not even picking on that specific series, it's probably not even the only example of that type of show that's been created in the last decade.
In short, how do you elevate it to more than a second-rate, middling, competent and utterly forgettable adaptation lost among the streams and appealing only to fans of the original work.
I think the two are sufficiently different that you could do it well. Just because they share the same genre doesn't mean they're necessarily redundant. Specifically Neuromancer has a very interesting mixture of pop culture and late stage capitalism that I could see being unique. A meditation on extreme wealth inequality and the dehumanizing aspects of capitalism and colonialism could be fascinating. I think any auteur could make this into a unique piece of art. I just question whether that's going to happen here.
Yeah, and I came here to mention this, as I tried to watch it and got 4-5 episodes in before giving up.
Some of it was really frickin cool, and you can even feel some of William Gibson voice shine through into the world.
I probably want this to work more than anybody, but even for me the show was just unwatchable. So often the characters get nothing to do, nothing to say, it's nobody's job to create narrative momentum. It's just brutal.
That said, I'm still not deterred from wanting to watch necromancer just because I want that type of show to work. A show where technology isn't just window dressing, and there's real curiosity about how it impacts the world, and there's real imagination about how to extract original and interesting visual aesthetics from it.
I'll offer an opposing viewpoint that the show was totally watchable and not "brutal" for me. Some of the acting/story was a bit over the top, but overall still a pretty good show and interesting idea. I've read Neuromancer but wouldn't say I'm a William Gibson expert/fan, so maybe the show is more appealing to the average viewer like me.
I was enjoying the show a lot, and liked to watch it all the way to the end, but for the second half I felt like I was just watching a series of scenes that I liked, not a coherent story. I couldn't make heads or tails of why what was happening, was indeed happening. I chalked it up to being tired at night, and made a note to rewatch sometime soon, but now I have doubts...
I mean, this is more or less how I felt reading the first quarter to half of The Peripheral. Each chapter (scene) seemed disconnected and out of context, even once I understood the two time periods.
And it's a legitimate criticism of the books. Fidelity to substance of the original is one thing, execution is another. I think the weaknesses of the books as transposed to film, combined with poor execution of craft are what make one different from the other.
Isn't that kind of appropriate, though? You create a world where there are enormous technological and sociological forces that are outside of your characters' control, and those forces change who the characters are. That's a big part of the point.
It's about characters, technology trends and plot details that are a thousand times more specific. The execution of it is bad, and it's only through extremely lazy equivocation that those two things can be said to be the same.
The "go ahead, take some of this money" scene is bone-crushingly stupid, just for one and it's one of a raft of examples of the dialog is so lacking in any world building detail or signal of character motivations.
The greatest credit I can give it is that it fails in an interesting way, and doesn't fail from lack of interest in source material. And I'd rather live in a world full of shows that fail in interesting ways than ones that successfully execute familiar and shallow "is technology bad?" themes over and over.
I loved the book and struggled watching the show. You could tell which scenes were written by William Gibson, and which ones were written by the Westworld people. Around episode 3 or 4 the plot completely diverges from the book, and almost all of it is generic 'prestige TV' type writing. I would have dropped the show around episode 4 or 5 if it I didn't love the book. Can't really recommend it to anyone.
To clarify: so much of the show's runtime feels like filler. Every episode has 1-2 scenes of characters arguing which are completely inconsequential to the plot. Every once in a while a character will suggest an interesting idea for how the time travel technology could be used in a novel way. But every time characters have a conversation with any depth, the show runners feel the need to cut away to an inconsequential fight scene so a hypothetical viewer won't be bored.
Same, managed the first few episodes which were full of good ideas from Gibson, and then it meandered off into drivel. The adaptation of Neuromancer will be garbage, I plan on actively avoiding it.
Looks like I stopped right about where you did, even though I was quite impressed with the potential in the first 2 episodes, while my hope really started to wane by episode 3.
Yeah, and it's pretty good, although if you like the idea, I'd recommend just reading the book. It's very different from Neuromancer, it feels like a very different Gibson has written it (more considered, but perhaps less agile - there's nothing quite as vivid as "the sky above the port"), but the central conceit is really interesting. There's already a sequel (Agency), and supposedly a third book on the way.
Amazon has several: The Expanse counts for a lot in my book.
Netflix obviously has Stranger Things, Dark, now 1899, and a million other things because they just make some of everything. Sense8, Black Mirror, Love Death and Robots, Cyberpunk Edgerunners...
Amazon has the amazing "Tales from the loop" which is IMHO the best SciFi show they produced. I think it gets overlooked because of the low-key "tale" format, where every episode is its own little story in a shared universe. But it's beautifully filmed and truly captures the essence of Simon Stalenhag's paintings which it is based upon.
Invasion was good but not great. It got off off to a solid start with well-developed, interesting characters (well-acted), good music and good direction. I also really liked how the story-line for the character played by Sam Neill dashed my expectations (don’t want to spoil it for others). Not knowing what exactly was happening required a certain investment in the fate of the characters and while watching I wasn’t sure if they pay-off would be worth it. Unfortunately, the second half of the season did not quite live up to the potential that the first part hinted at. After finishing the show, I found it didn’t really leave a lasting impact on me though it’s probably still worth a watch if you like science fiction.
Not quite science fiction – but I’d highly recommend the Shining Girls mini-series. I like self-contained shows that tell their stories in one season and both my wife and I thought this was excellent (story, acting, direction, visuals). Again, the viewer doesn’t know what’s happening at the start: does the protagonist have some sort of schizophrenia or is there something stranger going on? (not going to spoil it). Apparently, it was (loosely?) based on a book but I’d never heard of the book so can’t say anything about that.
I always need to remind people when this book comes up: If you like Neuromancer, you must play the game Soma.
I picked up Neuromancer after playing Soma and finding it to be the most incredible story driven game I've ever played and wanting to devour all it's influences, and Gibson was certainly an influence.
Don't read about it, don't look at the plot, just start playing the game and at least make it to when you meet the lady.
The biggest obstacle stopping Neuromancer from being a viable TV show, IMO, is the lack of cohesion between chapters - readers are frequently dumped into the middle of entirely different circumstances than the previous chapter, just as they were maybe getting a grip on what was going on. And honestly, it kind of works! The pacing would be far too slow if characters stopped every five minutes to explain what was going on for the audience's sake. Hypothetically this could work in an episodic format, but will it be signed off on by conservative showrunners/execs? I'd guess no, but will remain cautiously optimistic.
I think the trick to a tv adaptation is to not restrict oneself to a strict adaptation of the book but rather to reorder things, etc. to allow for character development. The visual medium also leaves a lot of things to be inferred by viewers without going into excruciating detail to explain things.
I could see it also working well in episodic format with episodes focusing on individual characters.
I was iffy about AppleTV+. Why do I need another streaming service?
Then I got an offer of 6 months for free. Decided to try it out. Started For All Mankind. And was pleasantly surprised! Good visuals, great acting and despite being technically science fiction (alternate world timeline) it felt incredibly grounded in reality. Science is on point. Even more so than The Expanse. I had high expectations and it exceeded them.
I hope they don't drop the ball. Although to be fair, these days that's not even difficult. The first streaming service that promises to finish the series they start will get my subscription. It's a huge problem in sci fi.
If you haven't yet, check out Severance. Really incredible I suppose near-future sci fi? Started a bit slow for me but eventually became one of the best shows I've seen in years.
I was in the same boat with AppleTV+. A couple of years ago, the only thing I’d heard people talk about was The Morning Show and that didn’t seem worth it. Then, after buying an Apple device, we got a year’s subscription and since then, there’s been enough quality content for us to keep paying after the year ran out.
> Science is on point.
So was the politics – the internal NASA politics, the relationship between NASA and the US government, and how the US would respond to the Soviet Union. Equally on-point was the personal lives and relationships of the various characters; there’s more than enough human interest for viewers who aren’t into science or politics).
I loved the first two seasons but unfortunately, the quality dropped badly for the third season – particularly the latter half. I’m not sure I’d watch another season (if it comes out).
I’d also fully concur with my sibling commentator recommeding Severance. See mine and others’ comments in this thread.
I have long since stopped being excited for modern makes/remakes of titles I enjoy, and just anticipate disappointment and cringe when its "updated for today's audience" into stupidity and garbage.
I think the only way to do Neuromancer justice is to recapture the camp yet earnest energy of the Johnny Mnemonic movie. Unfortunately I don't have high hopes.
Modern film making technology can probably do much better justice to a book like Neuromancer but the technology isn't the most important part. The BBC did a radio adaptation almost 20 years ago and you can find it on YouTube and other places. I enjoyed it and it is worth listening to.
At least it's not "Snow Crash". For the love of all that is good please, nobody try to adapt "Snow Crash". (I wonder if I should try to crowd-fund buying the film rights to "Snow Crash" so it can be off-the-table forever...)
I agree with you, although maybe for different reasons. A lot of the vibe of snowcrash almost felt like a saturday morning cartoon, and it seems like it would make even more sense on the screen than in a book. I also understand it was originally intended to be a graphic novel.
I didn’t know about the graphic novel intention, but that probably explains why I have only ever seen it working in a motion picture medium, in my mind, as an anime. A well-done “Snow Crash” anime would absolutely do the material justice but I’m not sure it would have enough market potential to get made. I’d kick money into that cause, too.
Cavil is now executive producer of the Warhammer Cinematic Universe. So I'm pretty sure he will be involved. Besides that, his career seems fine. Guy Ritchie just signed him for a WW2 action film The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
He recently left The Witcher to play Superman again but just two weeks later studio changed their mind and announced he will not be playing Superman anymore. With WH40k series he will be on production team so it is less likely he will get dropped again.
He left Witcher to to more Superman, but then James Gunn took over DC and scrapped that. But this is exactly what Cavil needed, a big show that he is also super excited about. Cavil plays warhammer as a hobby and is passionate about it.
My dirty little secret: with the exception of the Three Body Problem I have a terrible habit of waiting for the threat of Hollywood adaptations before picking up modern SF classics. Neuromancer is unfortunately in that category.
Ugh, Three Body Problem is another show I'm excited for but have super low hopes. Another super hard to film show, but with excellent source material. I really hope Netflix and D&D don't mess it up.
I'm all for it. Netflix has turned into a production house of generic drivel for the most part (and as AI improves I'm sure it'll only get worse as the bar for low-effort derivative scripts drops).
Apple TV+ hasn't been without its issues but it's had some truly well-thought out content. Severance is riveting, carefully filmed and thought out, and unlike most TV I've watched in the last 10 years. For all mankind started off quite rough but improved significantly in later seasons as well.
For all its faults as a company, Apple has done a great job leaving creativity to the creatives when it comes to shows.
In case anybody is interested in the art displayed on the right side; It's by Josan Gonzalez, who does amazing dystopic illustrations. The pic in question turns out to be the cover for a Brazilian edition of the book, and I'm guessing it's otherwise unrelated to the series, which is a pitty because Jason's art is amazing.
Here's a slightly animated showreel of his artbook "The Future is Now":
Aside of who's casted, I hope the director/producer is a strong figure with artistic liberty.
I'm gonna sound like a grouchy old man, but streaming services are completely killing cinema. TV shows spanning +8 seasons, with all different producers/directors.
I'd like this to be a short series (4 episodes TOPS) with one very strong director that can set their foot strong and don't comply to Apple to make it extremely mainstream (like what Netflix did with Cowboy Bebop's adaptation, couldn't pass the first 15 minutes).
I feel like streaming services and premium cable have really nailed down the long form narrative on screen.
I don't really want an 8+ season show anymore. That's a recipe for dragging things out that distract from the narrative. A show that hits you with 5 minutes of story, 30 minutes of monster-of-the-week, and 5 minutes of story + a cliffhanger isn't nearly as good as a 8-10 episode season of pure narrative.
If it lasts only 3 seasons it's still better, and leaves more room on the proverbial marquee for the next story.
I think the huge masterpieces of cinema were told in only ~180 minutes (give or take). If you’re creating a more than 8 episode production you’re either:
a) not good enough to condense and keep only the best, the most important pieces.
b) your story is VERY unique and it does require 8 episodes.
It’s highly unlikely that b) happens. For example, the Lord of the Rings only took 3 really good movies.
So that leaves me with a). A bunch of the modern productions are just filling the show with low-relevance stuff just to keep people plugged at their TV.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Friends was very good in 10 seasons, but it’s just a sitcom. A documentary can be longer. Again, the bulk of productions, IMHO, should be less than 5 episodes (Chernobyl for example).
Very much agree. Lately, I’ve been watching The X-Files as back in the nineties, I’d only ever seen the odd episode here and there and never saw them in order. It turns out that many of the monster-of-the-week episodes are quite superfluous and not really worth watching – though you don’t know until after you’ve watched it). Likewise, I’d be reluctant to (re)watch old Star Trek, Stargate or other shows that don’t focus on a well-developed story arc.
Some of my favourite shows of recent years have been stories that get wrapped up in one season: True Detective, The Terror, Shining Girls.
Two animated series this year did a decent job of portraying different parts of the world portrayed in Neuromancer, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Pantheon (based on short stories by Ken Liu).
I really enjoyed Cyberpunk Edgerunners. Been recommending it to everyone that will listen. I felt it really nailed what I imagined Neuromancer would look like. E.g. the "hacking" scenes looked exactly like the 'ice' hacking in Neuromancer.
Not the best time to be turned into a tv show but some books end up being filmed many times so maybe no harm here. I hope they don't update the setting and keep it retro future.
Neuromancer was mind-blowing in, what was it, the mid '80s? I think I had just upgraded from an 8K PET to a Commodore 64 w/300 baud modem and was finding local phone numbers to log into BBS's.
We're all well past that now.
A faithful retelling would have some nostalgia value, but I'm hoping they go for something more ambitious. I know they can't drop a brain bomb on me like Gibson did, but hope they can make me jitter a bit.
A computer hacker, with a film noir kung-fu love interest by his side, jacks into a simulated cyberspace known as "The Matrix"? Facing a malevolent A.I., with the guidance of an "oracle"-like aspect of that A.I.?
Hasn't this already been adapted? The idea of going back to the original source material at this point feels almost... quaint. I hope it doesn't feel like it's aping its successors, rather than the other way around.
Gosh, Neuromancer is such a light précis of the genre it defined: it’s exciting to think this might be a multi season anthology doing a deep dive on the world, and also anxiety inducing thinking they might try to cover the whole story in one season, missing all the nuance along the way.
Walt and Jessie gave up a whole episode to a fly in their lab. Will we see a whole episode dedicated to lung sized holo inducers?
I think with all adaptations, there exist brilliant filmmakers who can adapt any work at the same level as the original, but our odds of getting that person and all the right circumstances to allow for total success are relatively low. More likely is really bad design by committee, or something that contains pretty good ideas but does enough wrong to lose the magic.
Very cool, I was watching Johnny Mnemonic recently and lamenting that Gibson's stories have never really been given a fair chance on film/tv. Mnemonic is worth a rewatch and IMHO has actually improved with age now that you can look back at some of the effects and such as retro 90s nostalgia. I'm looking forward to see what Apple does for Neuromancer.
A few months ago they came out with a black and white recut of Johnny Mnemonic. Around that time I was rewatching it and what hit me like a brick was this is what the movie's depiction (released in 1995) of what Beijing in 2021 would look like: https://i.imgur.com/WZY6hjf.png
Read the book a few years ago, then watched the series. Doesn't quite follow the book but is entertaining anyway. You also have to pay attention as not everything is explained right away. The series 1 ending is a bit confusing. The only complaint I have is the actors' accents may cause you to turn on CC at times.
Neuromancer on the screen is a "I'll believe it when I see it" at this point. Granted, this seems much more likely - but I've been burned before.
I also worry that it's too late for this to be done well, but it's pretty much my favorite book so I'm glad to see where it goes. Will probably be the thing that makes me actually bother with Apple TV+.
I don't actually like The Wheel of Time, so my reactions to the show are about whether it's good television: I think it was.
Rings of Power was unwatchable, I gave up.
I never really liked Foundation (although I read all the books when I was too young to realize Asimov was incapable of portraying characters that weren't paper thin). I found some of the changes obnoxious but comprehensible for building a show, but found it also to be watchable TV.
I'm pretty confident the people producing these shows care more about whether people think it's watchable TV than whether big fans of the original agree their conversion is faithful, which sounds like your complaint, here.
I'm extremely excited about this news. There was a point where Chris Cunningham was slated to be adapting it which I think would have been amazing, really hope they expand the team listed in the article with the right talent.
Given the experience of the meh version of the Peripheral on Amazon and the uniquely literal visions proffered by Neuromancer, I imagine it will be difficult to bring the brilliant novel to a brilliant film.
Oooh boy, big boots to fill. Related/aside: I've had this silly whimsical idea for a couple years of a Broadway adaptation of Neuromancer starring (and with music written by) Logic.
Just rotate through all of the services one at a time -- switch every 3 months or so, and you'll be rewarded with lots of fresh content. It also saves you a lot of money! (You get to watch everything from Disney/Netflix/Etc for 1/3rd of the cost.)
This is why I try to subscribe to everything via my iPhone. I can go into the subscription page of settings and with one tap start or stop any of the services I've subscribed to through there. Even if I have to pay more than going direct, the convenience is worth it to me.
I think this is a great time to make it -- telling stories focused on women is popular now (no flamebait), with a big enough budget it wouldn't look cheesy, and it's such a great story. As long as they cast Neil deGrasse Tyson as Doc of course :)
I'd read Ron Howard was working on it, but that burned up in the atmosphere or something. Honestly, doesn't even have to be a movie or series, just give me an extended premium CGI flyby around and through some O'Neill cylinders.
Unbelievably arrogant of Apple TV+ to continue to appropriate for itself the moral right to adapt sci-fi classics after having created an almost unending stream of absolute garbage for three years.
