What's happening with the Neuromancer movie?

28 April 2008

Gerard Wood

For those who weren’t aware, William Gibson’s seminal work of Cyberpunk, Neuromancer, is being filmed. This is great news!

Except, of course, it’s neither news nor, when you weigh up the facts, is it great.

An announcement last year named Peter Hoffman as producer and Joseph Kahn as director, with another announcement this year that Hayden Christensen would be in the lead role as Case, the novel’s washed up hacker protagonist.

A budget of US$70M was pulled out of the hat, which is neither ridiculously high nor ridiculously low, giving the whole thing a ring of authenticity. IMDB lists the movie as in pre-production with a 2009 release, but here’s the thing: nobody involved with the project has a word to say about it. Not the producer, director or leading man.

I don’t know about you, but that seems mighty odd to me. You’d think that participation with this groundbreaking classic of SF would warrant some noise by those involved: how many novels win the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award? But there’s no mention of it on Kahn’s website, nothing on any of the many sites dedicated to Christensen and not a word from Hoffman. William Gibson, who like most authors (with the notable exception of J.K. Rowling, it seems) relinquished any say in the matter when he sold the rights to the novel, is suitably philosophical about it: “Myself, I'll be willing to entertain the idea that Neuromancer is really ‘headed for the big screen’ when I'm watching it being shot. As the old saying goes, I'll believe it when I see it.”

Why bring this up now? It’s not news, it’s the antithesis of news. But it’s precisely that which makes it newsworthy. Or at least worthy of comment because it raises some questions for those of us who care about our science fiction.

So, here’s a question to begin with. Who cares about this project?

At a guess I’d say only those of us who value the novel. Nobody who loves film could get terribly excited by the line-up: Hoffman’s involvement with another Gibson project, Johnny Mnemonic, is memorable for all the wrong reasons; Kahn seems to have been picked on the merit of a Britney Spears’ video, Toxic (WTF!); and having endured Christensen’s latest offering, Jumper, the less said about Christensen the better. Although to be fair to the actor, the movie really suffered as a consequence of the adaptation. I’ll get back to that in a moment.

SFFMedia’s readership is divided between those mostly interested in SF&F film and TV, and those mostly interested in literature, so here’s another question that could be divisive (unless you love both film and literature, I suspect). Who believes that studios make science fiction and fantasy movies for fans of the literature?

I don’t. Sure, there are exceptions but they’re rare. How often have you been pleased by the film version of a loved science fiction or fantasy novel? I can count the number on one hand (and three of those are Lord of the Rings). An exception would have to be the Harry Potter movies; these must have been produced for fans of the novels, because as entertaining as they are, there’s so much absent from the screen adaptations that full enjoyment can only be had by filling in the gaps yourself.

Once a studio gets hold of a good literary idea they naturally think in terms of a cinema audience. Fair enough, you might say, it’s all about adapting one medium (a novel) to another (film) and that has to involve, well, adaptation. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the concept well enough but what I’m hinting at here (none too subtly) is the wholesale butchery of a novel or short story for the screen that characterises most science fiction and fantasy adaptations. Which is why we get Jumper, Next, Total Recall, Earthsea… I could go on.

In many instances the decisions made by studios are unnecessary and succeed only in undermining the integrity of a work of fiction. A good case in point is Walden Media’s adaptation of Susan Cooper’s classic fantasy novel, The Dark is Rising. Here is a novel with generations of delighted readers and yet the studio’s decision to change the nationality of the main character from British to American – a change that adds nothing to the story - could only ever succeed in alienating the established readership. The success of the movie says it all. Did they really believe that the American cinema going public couldn’t hack another British school boy wunderkind?

So what does this have to do with Neuromancer, you might ask? After all, there’s no word about the movie, let alone how it’s been butchered adapted.

Respect, short and simple. Respect for the novel (and the writer), for the fans of the novel, and lovers of film. Given the sad history of adaptations, it’s bad enough that a studio has got its hands on this classic of the genre, but worse still that it has been placed in the hands of an inexperienced director. I really don’t think I’m a voice in the wilderness when I say this, but guys, do it right or don’t do it at all!

Why does this sound so painfully familiar? Oh yeah, I’d almost forgotten… Dune.

Here ends the rant.

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