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Why I Want to See Neuromancer: A Confession
This is a little embarrassing to admit. I didn’t totally understand Neuromancer. It’s a great novel. It garners 4 out of 5 stars by the 300 WWEnders who have read it, which I assume means they grasped it better than I did. Don’t get me wrong, though. I did enjoy reading it (Gibson has a beautifully poetic writing style), but I think I may have read it too quickly. Life in cyberspace, after all, is inherently esoteric. He’s describing techology that didn’t exist yet, so his names for everything are different from we might call them now.
That is why I’m more interested in the upcoming movie than I usually would be. I don’t just want to see a great book recreated on the silver screen….I want to see what the hell it was all about! Recently, it’s been revealed that Mark Wahlberg and Liam Neeson have been tapped to help explain this novel to me.
Some Upcoming Sci-Fi Films
Director Vincenzo Natali talks to io9 about his upcoming film adaptations of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and J.G. Ballard’s High Rise:
First of all let me say that it’s a good thing for Neuromancer that those films [The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic] exist. It’s a good thing that Avatar exists. For a couple reasons — first and foremost, in 1984, I don’t even know how people understood Neuromancer when they read it. It was just so far ahead of the curve, that even as a book, I imagine that it was very difficult for people to wrap their heads around it.
Thanks to The Matrix, which obviously was heavily influenced by Neuromancer, a lot of these ideas are now a part of the popular consciousness. So when you make the Neuromancer movie, in whenever it’s going to be — 2012, 2011 — you don’t have to explain a lot. It’s already understood, and then you can get to the really good stuff. Which in my mind is about approaching the post-human world. To me that’s what the movie is about.
