These images do not give me hope for the show. Everything about it gives me content vibes. Why don't they pick people who are passionate about the source material and give them some amount of creative freedom and a decent budget. The cyberpunk drawing in the thumbnail of this post should have been the vibe and look of the show, not this CW shit
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2025
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The eyes aren't right, but the shoulder pads seem wrong.
I will watch this, but only because I'm fairly certain Neuromancer is unadaptable to the screen. The thing that makes William Gibson great is the fantastic way he writes, leaving so much to the imagination but creating a definite vibe. When you have to fill out every single detail to render it on screen, it's not going to be the same work. I'm sure It'll share characters and plot points, but these are not the things that make Neuromancer such a classic.
The headline with William Gibson and neuromancer is always "He coined the term cyberspace! Helped invent the cyberpunk genre!" (i.e, the stuff that he writes about) But he's a fantastic writer as well, no matter what he writes about (he doesn't just write cyberpunk!). His prose is what makes him my favorite author, not just the stories he tells
Contrary to the article, I'm a sci fi enthusiast and I'm not excited. This looks like it has the quality of the Amazon LotR costume design. And I agree, I'm certain this book is not adaptable to the big screen
Yeah I read the book in January and I'm not confident in a screen adaptation, there's a lot of visual concepts that would fall flat if not handled well
I'm hoping they stick with the book's 'cassette futurism.' Remember that at one point they are selling pocket-sized VCRs at one of the markets, and the space ship pilot is afraid of a 'virus.'
The makers of this show - Best I can do is a cheaper copy of Spielbergs Minority Report
Someone else in the thread made this point.
When the book first came out there was nothing like it. Today, the book's ideas have been recycled dozens of times.
There's a great movie "Predestination." It's based on a book written in the 1950's and it uses a future that looks like something people in the 1950s would have imagined 1975 would look like.
Johnny Pneumonic actually states how much memory he has in his brain and itos incredibly small for our time like megabytes small.
Johnny Pneumonic
Autocorrect is screwing with ya, bro!
Don't change it, because it's funny
Yes...autocorrect..I totally did not have a senior moment...nope my brain is a steal trap.
I'm going to steel that gag.
Not really who I pictured for Molly but it's on Apple TV so I won't see it anyways lol
Apple TV+ is currently the only streaming service I’m paying for (and only because it’s bundled in with my family’s Apple One subscription); but honestly their offerings are a tier above the slop on most other services.
Between Severance, The Silo, Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, Shrinking and a bunch of others that escape me right now — it somewhat reminds me of the “good ol’ days of early Netflix exclusives” in terms of breadth and quality.
So with that said, I’m also a sucker for future/dystopia media in particular (living my rewatch of Westworld at the moment, half-way through S4); so I’ll definitely be checking this out.
If you haven't looked at it yet, 'Slow Horses.'
It starts off well, drags through the rest of the first episode, and hits its stride about halfway through the second episode. but watch it all because when you look back you'll appriciate the build up.
I actually started on the first episode not too long ago (it auto-played after the Severance finale); but I was still digesting that ending and didn’t pay it too much attention.
I’ll give it another try in the near future - I just wrapped up Westworld and am just starting on Snowpiercer.
Apple TV looks like it has a lot of great shows, but I'm already paying for a bunch of other streaming services and at this point I'm just not signing up for anymore on principle
That’s fair, to be honest. The missus and I began alternating streaming services ~18 months ago as we tend to only watch one-to-three shows at a time, so most services ended up going unwatched for weeks at a time.
Anything new we catch and end up enjoying, manages to ‘find its way’ onto our home NAS for later rewatching. Looking back, this was actually the easiest cut to our household budget. Would highly recommend considering it!
Slow Horses, Acapulco, Bad Sisters
🏴☠️
Steppin razor
Wait, they're actually doing the eye lenses? That's always been my "would look goofy on film" thing.
I guess they'll be retractable? I don't remember if they were supposed to be retractable in the book.
My theory is that they are shooting with the spoons and then some team of poor schmucks gets the lucky assignment of burning 12+ hour days 7 days a week to make the spoons look less spoon.
"lucky" assignment.
It kinda makes sense? Spiderman and Deadpool both they spent a lot of time fixing the mask to make the body language work.
Could have at least done them as metallic looking contacts over her eyes instead of these silver spoons, this looks goofy as hell
No... Hell no.
She had her tear ducts reversed so she spit out her tears.
Yeah this adaptation is fucked.
Maybe, although I get the feeling that we may not agree on why.
I mean, I wouldn't have done the lenses at all. You just nod at them with some subtle contacts or something and go on with your day.
Or you could go the Deus Ex way with it, which I suppose is why I was inserting the whole retractable sunglasses thing into the conversation. Either way I don't know that it's worth attempting, even if they look better in the final version through some VFX enhancement or whatever.
Do the lenses. They, aside from the razor blade nails, were the defining characteristic.
Do them right.
Rather than set up a lazy shot-reverse-shot ala Attack of the Clones, every scene Molly is in gives us a background that can be flipped and displayed in the lenses in order to showcase what the character is feeling.
And then cast her with someone who can do a Carl Urban-as-Dredd performance without ever showing us her actual eyes.
Experimental? Edgy? Overly difficult? Artistically pretentious even?
Maybe.
But these stills are shot at day and without neon? So, much better than whatever paint-by-numbers checklist they are using to produce this abomination..
Im not happy about the look of the shades, but what bothers me so far is that lack of inherent menace, the sense of barely constrained violence of Molly.
She needs to radiate imminent death. So far, I'm just seeing an attractive woman in a "futuristic" suit with shiny sunglasses. Molly wasent just "shades and blades," she was someone jacked to the nines, lithe and ferocious.
The stills aren't doing her justice. Hopefully live action does.
I would have made the mirror shades a little bigger and more angled but also clearly embedded in her face, and the mirror surface look a lot nicer. The key is that the shades should completely obscure any facial expressions she would be making around her eyes in order to look cold. I’d also make her hair darker, but maybe in an unnatural shade of blue-black.
Looks like she's walking out of an Apple store
Is that like "iPhone face" but for sci-fi?
Yeah, well, I don't know much about this thing. I will say that you never judge the look of a thing from set stills.
I will also say I don't know how you do Neuromancer without devolving into self-parody at this point. I'm just going to go back to my corner and go back to not knowing anything about this until it's out.
Neuromancer without devolving into self-parody...
What was that bit about trying to read Hamlet and deciding it was just people sitting around in castles speaking in cliches?
I mean, if they can make a 3rd adaptation of Dune: The Consumable Content Experience then I'm sure someone can find a way to make a Neuromancer that would be me than just a generic block of media - greenlit while pointing to the mere existence of The Peripheral as financial onus.
Maybe next time then.
Well, there's a very meaningful set of differences there. For one thing, by the time Dune first got adapted there weren't that many derivatives. Some of the imagery landed in Star Wars, but that was about it, by the time Lynch had his shot.
The issue with Neuromancer is that it's been adapted dozens, hundreds of times in all but name. Every iconic piece of that story has a hundred spins and spins of those spins elsewhere.
So when you do Paul Atreides you maaay have to contend with the fact that you're doing Luke Skywalker on LSD. When you do Molly you have to choose which pieces of Trinity, the like five iterations of Motoko Kusanagi, Ellen Ripley, Flynne Fisher and a dozen others, including at least one other version of Molly herself you're embracing or ignoring. You have to choose where you go with Blade Runner, The Matrix, Ghost in the Shell, Pantheon, Deus Ex, The Peripheral, Cyberpunk 2077, Westworld, Robocop, Shadowrun, Escape from NY, Aeon Flux, System Shock, Minority Report or a bunch of others. There are like four different Keanu Reeves characters you may choose to embrace or dismiss in this process. Just the fact that you're going to have to work around a bunch of talk about The Matrix and Zion is an issue.
I'm not saying that is or will be the problem with this version specifically. We'll see what they have when they're ready to show their homework. I'm saying that would definitely be one of my main anxieties if I had to find the way to do this accurately in 2025.
otoh. One of my all time favorite shows is Batman The Animated Series. They used stuff from pretty much every iteration of Batman and threw in some new ones.
For sure. That said, Batman is on the other end of the spectrum, where a bunch of iterations of THE Batman were already there in the first place. For the most part TAS is conceptually Tim Burton's Batman: The Cartoon, it just so happens that by 1992 you also could pull from multiple generations of comics and shows as well.
The problem with Neuromancer is it doesn't have a definitive, iconic iteration, let alone multiple. The closest you get is Johnny Mnemonic, which definitely isn't it. Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell or The Matrix are all more of a definitive iteration of Neuromancer than anything Neuromancer (besides the book, obviously).
I remember specific details from the books, like the pocket-sized VCRs or Count Zero's holoporn poster and infinite T-shirt. In my mind, the entire world looks like Times Square on New Years Eve 1985. I think if you start with the idea that the boom box was the greatest thing ever invented you'll have the right ascetic.
I think that's itself a bit of a problem. Is Neuromancer futuristic or retrofuturistic? It's one thing to adapt Dune, which may be from the 60s, but is in such a weird technological tangent it may as well be The Lord of the Rings. Neuromancer is THE FUTURE specifically as seen in the 80s, which now ranges somewhere between nostalgic, prescient and quaint. And actually done right elsewhere in the actual 80s.
I still think it is relevant enough you could get away with making it THE FUTURE as per the 2020s, but then people who envision it like you do (which is legitimate) would feel it's out of place, I suppose.
Look, it's not my job to figure it out, but let's at least agree that if it is doable, it is at least a big, big challenge.
I mentioned this movie already.
"Predestination." The book was written about the year 1975 AD in 1950s. They film makers made their 1975 conform to what the original writer imagined. I won't giver you a lot of details because it's the kind of science fiction that works better if you go in knowing very little.
The point is that I want 'retrofuture.' I want the writer's version of the future. I want the TVs to show grey static and people to be amazed by the idea of a computer virus.
In a similar way, a movie like 'The Great Gatsby' was based on a contemporary novel where the writer had a specific vision of how New York looked.
I see what you're saying, but I think sci-fi is in a bit of a different place there. Neuromancer is concerned with what's coming. It's not painting a 2000s of the 80s, it's painting the future of a present.
Predestination is a bit different in that it's a time travel story. In Neuromancer (or Blade Runner, for that matter) the technology is not about extrapolating technology, it's about extrapolating society.
It's not impossible for sci-fi to be coded to a time. I don't think you could make Strange Days today, it's so ingrained into the idea of the end of the millenium and the rise of the Internet. It'd be different even if you kept the setting. A nostalgic look back instead of an anxious look forward.
Neuromancer has the same problem, only on top of everything else it's also just vaguely futuristic, so it's not like the 80s look and feel is integral to the story (in case the endless rehashes of the stories for the past forty years hadn't proven that).
We'll see. The worst case scenario is we're thinking this through more than the people making the actual thing.
The first line is 'the television colored sky.' Gibson talks about how that went from grey static to bright blue to black. Seeing as how we've already surpassed a lot of the book's future, I think the film makers should embrace it and make a show that looks like it was made in the 1980s looking at a bizarre future.
On a related note; "Stand On Zanzibar" was written in 1968 and won the Hugo for best science fiction novel. It was set in the early 21st Century and is being republished because of how well the author predicted the future. You might want to give it a read.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/stand-on-zanzibar-john-brunner/7252770?ean=9781250781222&next=t
Salient points, all.
Yeah... Finally got around to reading Hamlet and "it's just a bunch of cliches"
But my main reservation with this adaptation is not which artistic choices are being made or the direction they decide to take things or even the difficulties in adapting the story (actually argued the other side of all this in FAVOR of the latest Dune) - and more that the source material was (likely) chosen simply for being a rich vein of dork-culture ore, one intended to be quickly and easily processed into a homogenized block of monetized consumer content..
The end result, once stripped of all pedigree and drained of any residial artistic expression, left as little more than a thumbnail to be scrolled past and forgotten alongside other milquetoast sci-fi projects like Travelers, or Continuum, Solo, etc..
An adaptation with nothing to say; "art" as a meaningless multimedia content experience
I genuinely don't know enough about the project to know if that tracks. As with anything, I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt until it's an actual thing and see if they figured out something that doesn't seem obvious.
I'm just... you know, also ready for it to suck for all those reasons, too.
Neuromancer... parody
I'd watch the hell out of a Snowcrash movie!!
If you haven't read it, look up Stephenson's "The Diamond Age."
I love a good book recommendation, thank you!