Apple TV+ to adapt William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer
cinemaexpress.com
cinemaexpress.com
But I am with you. Hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
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.
I assume Villeneuve got the deal safe for two parts but the numbers don't justify a part 3.
Maybe a TV show could raise more awareness.
That doesn't mean they'll go all the way to God Emperor, but I don't think we know for sure they won't.
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.
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.
And what might be attempted once might receive adaptations again, until someone gets it right.
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.
This is the first time I've encountered this term! What an excellent word.
Put that in Foundation's movie reel and film it!
Considering that, I think the interactions were too articulate. Trainspotting was Dune with less drugs and internal conflict.
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 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.
The effects were fine though.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
So yeah, good luck with that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33886291
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33886295
> No one wants to see Johnny Mnemonic again.
That adaptation is over 25 years old. I think we're probably a little better at adapting fiction as a society.
In particular I really liked Henry Rollins' performance. It was the one thing they got just right.
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.
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.
You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faHQA_0d9Mo
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 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.
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.
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.
The Lost argument though...
I re-read the books before the release and was severely underwhelmed.
I stayed up WAY too late to see what they would do next on a few occasions.
The emperors were horrible and yet I just couldn’t help but watch and sometimes hope they did X,y,or z. Not cheer for them but something like that.
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.
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...
It’s the only reason I signed up to Apple TV+. I looked for other shows on there, but cancelled not long after.
And I’m massively underselling it :)
In a different vein. Ted Lasso and The Morning Show.
Couldn't get into Foundation though. Not terrible but meh. May try again at some point.
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.
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.
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.
It's basically doing to Star Wars what The Wire did to Baltimore.
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.
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+.
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.
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.
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...
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.
[1]https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...
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?
I think the Empire aspects they added were surprisingly VERY strong.
No. It will not be good.
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.
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.
In 1988 when I read it, it was pretty amazing. That was a world before iPhones, the internet, etc.
The book was published in 1984, which was 10 years before dialup internet services were offered and 20 years before the iPhone came into existence.
But a series could get a lot more of the detail and side characters in it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S89BHnaxULo
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.
And also "The Golden Age" by John C. Wright.
Oh, and the Honor Harrington series.
I mean, hell, I'll take the "Oath of Swords" series. Why NOT make that?
And pleasepleaseplease make a mini-series (NOT A MOVIE) out of "Project Hail Mary."
Actually, yeah, these are all series, not movies. Pleasepleaseplease.
Oh yeah, I remember he announced who's playing Rocky: https://twitter.com/andyweirauthor/status/150996900478120345...
But on the other hand, I'm sooo glad to have 11 hours and 21 minutes of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions.
But on the Gripping Hand, I realize that having so much of The Hobbit is too much.
(Speaking of which, The Mote in God's Eye might also be really fun to see on the screen.)
So many fantastic, dense, and challenging subjects are explored in those books.
I hope if they do an adaption they give it a more serious tone than the book
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?
And oh my god, while looking that up I discovered he's got a SEQUEL coming in a month? Well, thank you for reminding me that Daniel Suarez exists.
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!
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.
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...
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...
"I do so enjoy my vork..."
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.
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.
Rereading it though, there are bits of brilliance in a sea of cigar smoke and 50’s atomic futurism. The suck fairy hit it pretty hard.
I wonder if the Mule vaguely corresponds to the rise of Muhammad and the Muslim conquests?
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.
I will say though, Foundation is more filmable than some of Asimov's other books. The Gods Themselves is truly, utterly, unfilmable.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
¹ https://web.archive.org/web/20081009182846/https://www.filmm...
I believe it's not so unpopular.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish they succeed though!
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.
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.
That's exactly how the books are. Cool concept, but there's barely any plot, nobody has any real motivation, things just happen to them.
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.
Foundation (Which I have not watched yet).
See
Mythic Quest.
Severence.
For All Mankind.
Prehistoric Planet (obviously not science fiction but for sure nerd).
And others that I am likely missing?
Also good science fiction that feels like they really invested in it
Wasn't there at tom hanks movie that involved a robot or something?
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...
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 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.
I could see it also working well in episodic format with episodes focusing on individual characters.
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.
> 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.
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...)
Why can't someone adapt Consider Phlebas? The book is already an action/adventure movie and the drones would make great merch :)
:glands Fidget:
I think it’s incredibly TV-able. Great story and lots of fun: aliens, spaceships, spies, changing, fancy weapons, funny AIs.
With enough money could make a really incredible TV series.
But, there’s been silence since they announced they were starting production several years ago
https://www.ign.com/articles/warhammer-40000-amazon-studios-...
Henry Cavill is apparently a fan is helping make it.
2- D&D should be forced to start every single workday by watching this video:
And explain, scene by scene, how and why this YouTuber would have been a better choice to write and direct the final season than they were
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":
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 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.
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).
Some of my favourite shows of recent years have been stories that get wrapped up in one season: True Detective, The Terror, Shining Girls.
Will be checking out Pantheon as well, thanks.
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.
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.
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?
One thing they got squarely wrong were cybernetic dolphins being used to crack decryption LOL.
Airborne pandemics were an established trope in cyberpunk by this time. Masamune Shirow's sardonic Dominion series from the late 80s comes to mind.
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+.
Let’s hope they won’t botch it like they did with The Foundation and the Rings of Power. (I don’t have high hopes)
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.
Wish they'd adapt Pattern Recognition though.
However I am waiting with bated breath for Wool. Cmon Apple release it already!!!
Still, I am very optimistic!
Bill: About THIS many.
Apple: Done. We begin principal photography in 90 days.