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.