Wahlberg, Neeson considering Neuromancer film roles
July 29, 2012
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Mark Wahlberg and Liam Neeson are mulling over offers to headline director Vicenzo Natali’s long-gestating adaptation of William Gibson‘s Neuromancer, Moviehole reports.
Wahlberg would play the anti-hero Case and Neeson would play Armitage.
Comments (5)
by Khannea Suntzu
And Molly? Molly? What about Molly? I want to know about Molly? Any word of Molly Millions?
by Starheart
Deliberate eighties retro-futurism may be the way to go for this picture, or it may not be because it may yet be a bit too close to present day to be intuitively distinct. We already got awesome alternate reality Eighties in the Watchmen movie, but portraying future with a divergent point in the not so distant past would be a closer call. For example, people didn’t quite notice the deliberate “eighties sci-fi” style of Mass Effect until it’s been explicitly pointed out.
Here’s what TVTropes has to say about it:
“Gibson wrote most of his early works on a typewriter. A copy of Neuromancer printed in 1994 includes an afterword by the author on that subject. Included in the afterword is a reminder to his modern readers that the typewriter was the high-tech whizbang of the the day. In 1981, the hottest computer on the mass market was the Apple II (not even the IIe, yet), and that cost a bundle. Case starts out trying to sell “three megabytes of hot RAM” in a world where Brain Computer Interfaces are commonplace. At the time the novel was written, the Apple II came with 64 kilobytes of RAM. It is possible that it was the contents of the RAM that was really important, but this possibility isn’t even suggested until much later in the book, and even then would only make slightly more sense to a modern audience. The book famously begins by likening the colour of the sky to that of a television tuned to a dead station. This originally conveyed a gray, dreary day, the colour of analogue static; nowadays, most TV sets default, ironically, to a blue screen when there isn’t a channel or anything to display. And you have a fantastic future of neural implants, orbital cities, domed weather control, and hyperintelligent AIs … but neither mobile phones nor anything like VoIP exists, and airports have banks of pay phones.”
by MatthewQ
Hollywood and the film industry at large are mostly behind the power curve when it comes to sci-fi and the coming techno-singularity. Hollywood in particular is actually a fairly conservative business- not liking to take chances with huge amounts of money, preferring instead to either redevelop existing ideas with a slight change or stick with something tried and true that with an effective marketing campaign can get the masses in to spend their money and turn them a profit.
Many people were influenced by William Gibson’s stories but they are outdated, by and large. I can’t help but reflect on Keanu Reeves running around with ’3 gb in his head’ and it was causing his nose to bleed. When you’re reading that story, you can make it work. When you watch it today (or even when it was released) it was just sort of comical.
Philip Dick is a Hollywood favorite and now we see the beginning of films based on his work being REMADE with Total Recall. Dick’s stories continue to work because they are usually built around a paranoia caused by changing technology and issues pertaining to identity. These are themes that stand the test of time. Even so, the fact that Hollywood is starting to recycle the pieces of his work that the industry has already examined is not a good sign for creativity in this genre.
There is so much good, relevant, Earth-based sci-fi out there- Greg Egan’s work for example- that Hollywood is seemingly completely ignorant of. If this continues, as the singularity gets closer and closer, Hollywood will become more and more disfunctional in-so-far as reflecting what’s going on in current culture is concerned. They will literally get left behind the same way the entire Silent Film infrastructure/people did. In that respect ‘The Artist’ (recent award winning silent film) was actually very prescient in describing the possible coming end of Hollywood and its city full of celebrities.
Imagine Tom Cruise as Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.
Hopefully, In the future, advances in tech are going to allow more and more innovative directors to create very good films on very low budgets; even high-tech films that are special effects heavy. You think Hollywood spends a lot of time and money going after DVD pirates? Wait till the public prefers to watch films that Joe Anonymous churns out from his basement studio and charges pennies per download. SWAT raids on unlicensed directors and actors will probably become common.
That’s an aside…
I just think the studio heads are probably too old, to be honest, to properly get their minds around what’s happening out there today- much less what’s coming down the pipe in 10-20 years. You can barely get a producer to read a 120 page script- I doubt many of them are tucked into Iain M Banks, Stephen Banks, Charles Stross et al.
by Starheart
Most unbelievable thing depicted in the movie will probably be corporate Japan taking over the world.
by de Broglie
That certainly is a problem. There are a lot of 80′s relics such as the Soviet Union. Also, Atlanta, GA is a software hub of the United States. I kind of hope they are true to the book. It is interesting to see how people in the 1980′s saw the coming information age.