8 ms·

Attack the Block’s Joe Cornish To Direct Cyberpunk Classic Snow Crash

60 points by waterlesscloud 14y ago

Codhisattva 14y ago
Best news of the day!
- objclxt 14y ago
  I wouldn't get too excited...it's been in development hell pretty much since the book was published. God knows how many writers have actually had a go at it, but I'm willing to bet a dozen or so (usually when a director gets attached they re-write the script with their preferred screenwriter). You end up with this situation where the studio has to release something, because they've spent so much money buying the options, paying for ump-teen rewrites, etc. Studios don't account this as a 'loss', since in theory they will make the money back when the film is released. There comes a point in development hell where you have to release something, because either a) your losses on the film are at a point where you can't keep rolling them over, or b) your options are going to expire - and if you're the studio executive who decides not to make the film and commit that loss to paper you can bet you won't be with the studio for much longer. The best case is you end up with something like Watchmen (which had been in development for about 20 years and had half a dozen big name directors attached, like Gilliam and Aronofsky). The final result is a reasonable film, although one that doesn't really compare to the source material and is fairly quickly forgotten. The worst case is the film doesn't get made (although if you're passionate about the source material you might argue this was the best case all along). This is a big simplification - in true Hollywood style, it's a lot more complex (Snow Crash actually bounced from Paramount to Disney and back again - the fact Disney was unable to do anything with it isn't really a good sign). What you can pretty much guarantee is that at the end of it you end up with a film that's average at best. It's a vicious cycle: say Joe Cornish writes a great script, but Paramount insist on some rewrites. Joe Cornish then has to drop out, because the rewrites cause the schedule to clash with another project. Another director comes on, and he insists on new rewrites to accomodate his style. Etc, etc etc.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    Yeah, it's a tossup if this works out or not. I'm guessing this came about because Cornish had a movie that did quite well with the geek critics, if not the box office. So he probably got some meetings off that and they asked him what he wanted to do next. He said Snow Crash, they figured why not, it's just sitting there, and here we are. This is all conjecture on my part, but it seems likely. Still, it's good to see it's floating to the surface again. Now, if Neuromancer would ever actually happen... EDIT: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura signed on to produce Neuromancer last month. That's a big deal, it might really get made. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-arts-and-prodigy-pictures-announce-lorenzo-di-bonaventura-to-join-production-team-of-neuromancer-2012-04-30 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-arts-and-prodigy-pict...
NathanKP 14y ago
Snow Crash is quite a classic book. It was actually one of the books that got me interested in coding/hacking. Anyone here who hasn't read it should do so right away. I'll be interested to see if Joe Cornish is able to pull off the technical aspects of the movie without it appearing too fake.
joejohnson 14y ago
>>"Hiro Protagonist – that’s the character’s name – a computer hacker/samurai swordsman/pizza delivery driver who investigates and tries to stop the takeover of postmodern civilization." That is not a complete sentence.
- DannoHung 14y ago
  Looks like that hyphenated aside swallowed the verb.
- FreakLegion 14y ago
  It's obviously an accidental omission. But just to play Devil's advocate, not complete isn't the same as not correct. For example, in this case we could just as well be looking at an appositive[1], making the sentence a perfectly well-formed answer to, say, the question "Who's the main character?" 1. http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/appositive.htm http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/appositive.htm
jon6 14y ago
I just finished snow crash a week ago, I found it pretty mediocre.
- ynniv 14y ago
  That's because you read it in the future.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Are there other cyberpunk books that you have read?
  - jon6 14y ago
    Ok, I'll bite. No I have not read any other cyberpunk books, but necromancer was recommended to me. Anyway (unlike the implication from ynniv) I had no problem with the metaverse. Here are the issues I can think of at the moment 1. no character development 2. "hiro protagonist" 10/10 on the lame scale 3. no explanation for why delivering pizzas is so important. there is one paragraph that attempts to explain it but fails miserably. 4. the girl only serves as a plot vehicle and does so incredibly poorly 5. hiro's dad and raven's dad were captured together? absurd 6. love of the rat thing for the girl is disney-level goofy 7. the "magic spell" juanita reads at the end is a little too convenient I did like the fighting scenes, though. There was one very good paragraph in the whole book -- the bit about how computers never seem to do the right thing and to get any modicum of productivity out of them the tools one uses must be transparent, meaning the user must have a deep understanding of their tools. That is a pretty deep insight that can be incorporated into daily life.
    - thwest 14y ago
      Yeah, a lot of people feel like its an action movie level parody of the genre.
    - fiddly_bits 14y ago
      My suspicion is that the rat-thing was inserted after-the-fact to facilitate the book's ending. It's been a while since I read it, and I remember enjoying it, but the rat-thing always seemed like a cheat to me. Also, snow crash? LCDs don't do that.
mdanger 14y ago
Interesting news - one wonders who they'll get for Hiro.
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  I don't think there are many (any?) African-American/Korean actors out there.
aero142 14y ago
It's been a few years since I read it, but I remember Snow Crash being filled will about 100 pages of explanation about the development of language in Mesopotamia and the basis of the plot still didn't make any sense. I'm concerned how the movie is going to approach this in 2 hours.
- sp332 14y ago
  As long as they have the scene where Hiro is piloting a boat through Rife's Raft using real-time satellite views in one eye, I'll be happy.
TwiztidK 14y ago
I'm still waiting for the mini-series adaptation of The Diamond Age, which I preferred to Snow Crash, that has been "in the making" for something like five years now.
te 14y ago
Is that an autostereogram?
- mistercow 14y ago
  I wondered this briefly as well, but can assure you that it is not. They resolve almost instantly for me, so I fortunately don't have to spend 10 minutes wondering if something is just noise.
  - Jtsummers 14y ago
    That image makes sense in the context of the book. In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it.
    - te 14y ago
      That's why I thought it should be an autostereogram. I hadn't tried to focus on one in 20 years, but I relearned it with a little practice. I couldn't get this image to resolve either, but I did feel like I was seeing something in there. I'm pretty sure it's not pure noise.
      - mistercow 14y ago
        Anything you feel like you're seeing in there is probably nothing more than pareidolia.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      I've read the book, so I knew that it shouldn't be an autostereogram. But checking is kind of an automatic procedure when I see an image like that. >In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it. Erm, that's not really what the image is a reference too. The noise is what the titular "snow crash" looks like when you use a particular digital "drug" (well not exactly a drug, but, spoilers you know). I don't recall anything about hackers being able to read binary code by looking at bitmaps, and I'm pretty sure that statement is contradicted by Hiro's skepticism that the binary code in the Snow Crash drug could actually have any effect on a human brain simply by entering the visual cortex.
golden_apples 14y ago
What I actually found most interesting reading back over the book lately was the very 90's take on ethnic balkanization. I don't think that ever really came to pass in the way it was always assumed it was happening at the time, and I think a primary reason for that is the kind of rapidly-changing tech economythat was the backdrop for the story. I'd be really curious to see how a present day retelling if the story would handle this disconnect.
DannoHung 14y ago
Attack the Block was pretty cool! Although spoilerwhen they talk about the phenome of the alien creatures, from a logical perspective it seems rather backwardsspoiler
yk 14y ago
Male Character .... Check Female Character .. Check Nuclear Weapon .... Check => James Bond with iPhones We should just hide the minority report and stop this crime against literature from happening. [Edit] Obviously I should elaborate a bit: Snow Crash is precisely the type of book, where it is really easy to make an disappointing movie. It has enough action scenes to fill 90 minutes without ever mentioning any of the interesting concepts of the book.
cstuder 14y ago
Fun fact: Snow Crash featured a software called 'Earth', a complete 3D view of the earth. Which inspired a company called Keyhole to write something like that. Which got later bought by Google and that product is now known as Google Earth.
- CoreDumpling 14y ago
  ... and which is now building the goggle interface device (Project Glass) that Hiro Protagonist used to great effect. Perhaps the Metaverse will be upon us soon. Will Google take over Second Life?
  - bascule 14y ago
    I think Project Glass is probably closer to Manfred Macx's data glasses from Accelerando
  - jfoutz 14y ago
    no, they'll take over minecraft. Much better to take a ridiculously simple system where anyone can build anything, and grow it into the full 3d design system of second life.
  - mnutt 14y ago
    One of the things that really attracted me was Snow Crash's very 90s idea that your plot of land in the Metaverse was run from your own computer. Of course, it didn't turn out that way and now everything is moving to the cloud.
    - pavel_lishin 14y ago
      Hey, the cloud is always online and my instances are mine. If I were running my website from my computer, it would be down every time I went into the subway.
      - mnutt 14y ago
        Presumably in the future connectivity will be much better than it is now, though I don't deny that there are real benefits of cloud hosting.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
hexagonal 14y ago
That certainly would have been an interesting take on the material, which some believe is essentially unfilmable. Seriously? Snow Crash was supposed to be a comic book, that's why the intro is so strongly visual. The Street, the sword duel on motorcycles, the Burbclaves, the Loglo, etc etc. Some of the deeper themes may be difficult to translate to a 120 minute movie, but that's not the same thing as unfilmable.
ZeroGravitas 14y ago
Some might be more familiar with Joe Cornish as the "Joe" of "Adam & Joe" fame on Channel 4 and Radio 6 music in the UK.
- gouranga 14y ago
  Didn't realise that. I remember the Adam & Joe Show. That rocked: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGkoBjn9U-c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGkoBjn9U-c
loudmax 14y ago
I really hope they manage to find someone with mixed African/Asian ancestry to play Hiro instead of whitewashing the character. It's not exactly a plot point, but it did give a sense that Protagonist was born ahead of his time.
- gouranga 14y ago
  As long as it's not Johnny flipping Depp, I'd be happy :) (I agree with you btw).
- Turing_Machine 14y ago
  At one time I thought Marcus Chong would be ideal but he's too old now. Maybe one of Rae Dawn's kids? They're probably old enough.
jere 14y ago
Probably the most enjoyable time I've had reading a book. And here is my favorite quote: >Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.

Best news of the day!

objclxt 14y ago
I wouldn't get too excited...it's been in development hell pretty much since the book was published. God knows how many writers have actually had a go at it, but I'm willing to bet a dozen or so (usually when a director gets attached they re-write the script with their preferred screenwriter). You end up with this situation where the studio has to release something, because they've spent so much money buying the options, paying for ump-teen rewrites, etc. Studios don't account this as a 'loss', since in theory they will make the money back when the film is released. There comes a point in development hell where you have to release something, because either a) your losses on the film are at a point where you can't keep rolling them over, or b) your options are going to expire - and if you're the studio executive who decides not to make the film and commit that loss to paper you can bet you won't be with the studio for much longer. The best case is you end up with something like Watchmen (which had been in development for about 20 years and had half a dozen big name directors attached, like Gilliam and Aronofsky). The final result is a reasonable film, although one that doesn't really compare to the source material and is fairly quickly forgotten. The worst case is the film doesn't get made (although if you're passionate about the source material you might argue this was the best case all along). This is a big simplification - in true Hollywood style, it's a lot more complex (Snow Crash actually bounced from Paramount to Disney and back again - the fact Disney was unable to do anything with it isn't really a good sign). What you can pretty much guarantee is that at the end of it you end up with a film that's average at best. It's a vicious cycle: say Joe Cornish writes a great script, but Paramount insist on some rewrites. Joe Cornish then has to drop out, because the rewrites cause the schedule to clash with another project. Another director comes on, and he insists on new rewrites to accomodate his style. Etc, etc etc.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Yeah, it's a tossup if this works out or not. I'm guessing this came about because Cornish had a movie that did quite well with the geek critics, if not the box office. So he probably got some meetings off that and they asked him what he wanted to do next. He said Snow Crash, they figured why not, it's just sitting there, and here we are. This is all conjecture on my part, but it seems likely. Still, it's good to see it's floating to the surface again. Now, if Neuromancer would ever actually happen... EDIT: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura signed on to produce Neuromancer last month. That's a big deal, it might really get made. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-arts-and-prodigy-pictures-announce-lorenzo-di-bonaventura-to-join-production-team-of-neuromancer-2012-04-30 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-arts-and-prodigy-pict...

Snow Crash is quite a classic book. It was actually one of the books that got me interested in coding/hacking. Anyone here who hasn't read it should do so right away. I'll be interested to see if Joe Cornish is able to pull off the technical aspects of the movie without it appearing too fake.

joejohnson 14y ago

>>"Hiro Protagonist – that’s the character’s name – a computer hacker/samurai swordsman/pizza delivery driver who investigates and tries to stop the takeover of postmodern civilization." That is not a complete sentence.

DannoHung 14y ago
Looks like that hyphenated aside swallowed the verb.
FreakLegion 14y ago
It's obviously an accidental omission. But just to play Devil's advocate, not complete isn't the same as not correct. For example, in this case we could just as well be looking at an appositive[1], making the sentence a perfectly well-formed answer to, say, the question "Who's the main character?" 1. http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/appositive.htm http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/appositive.htm

jon6 14y ago

I just finished snow crash a week ago, I found it pretty mediocre.

ynniv 14y ago
That's because you read it in the future.
jlgreco 14y ago
Are there other cyberpunk books that you have read?
- jon6 14y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. No I have not read any other cyberpunk books, but necromancer was recommended to me. Anyway (unlike the implication from ynniv) I had no problem with the metaverse. Here are the issues I can think of at the moment 1. no character development 2. "hiro protagonist" 10/10 on the lame scale 3. no explanation for why delivering pizzas is so important. there is one paragraph that attempts to explain it but fails miserably. 4. the girl only serves as a plot vehicle and does so incredibly poorly 5. hiro's dad and raven's dad were captured together? absurd 6. love of the rat thing for the girl is disney-level goofy 7. the "magic spell" juanita reads at the end is a little too convenient I did like the fighting scenes, though. There was one very good paragraph in the whole book -- the bit about how computers never seem to do the right thing and to get any modicum of productivity out of them the tools one uses must be transparent, meaning the user must have a deep understanding of their tools. That is a pretty deep insight that can be incorporated into daily life.
  - thwest 14y ago
    Yeah, a lot of people feel like its an action movie level parody of the genre.
  - fiddly_bits 14y ago
    My suspicion is that the rat-thing was inserted after-the-fact to facilitate the book's ending. It's been a while since I read it, and I remember enjoying it, but the rat-thing always seemed like a cheat to me. Also, snow crash? LCDs don't do that.

mdanger 14y ago

Interesting news - one wonders who they'll get for Hiro.

aaronbrethorst 14y ago
I don't think there are many (any?) African-American/Korean actors out there.

aero142 14y ago

It's been a few years since I read it, but I remember Snow Crash being filled will about 100 pages of explanation about the development of language in Mesopotamia and the basis of the plot still didn't make any sense. I'm concerned how the movie is going to approach this in 2 hours.

sp332 14y ago
As long as they have the scene where Hiro is piloting a boat through Rife's Raft using real-time satellite views in one eye, I'll be happy.

TwiztidK 14y ago

I'm still waiting for the mini-series adaptation of The Diamond Age, which I preferred to Snow Crash, that has been "in the making" for something like five years now.

te 14y ago

Is that an autostereogram?

mistercow 14y ago
I wondered this briefly as well, but can assure you that it is not. They resolve almost instantly for me, so I fortunately don't have to spend 10 minutes wondering if something is just noise.
- Jtsummers 14y ago
  That image makes sense in the context of the book. In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it.
  - te 14y ago
    That's why I thought it should be an autostereogram. I hadn't tried to focus on one in 20 years, but I relearned it with a little practice. I couldn't get this image to resolve either, but I did feel like I was seeing something in there. I'm pretty sure it's not pure noise.
    - mistercow 14y ago
      Anything you feel like you're seeing in there is probably nothing more than pareidolia.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    I've read the book, so I knew that it shouldn't be an autostereogram. But checking is kind of an automatic procedure when I see an image like that. >In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it. Erm, that's not really what the image is a reference too. The noise is what the titular "snow crash" looks like when you use a particular digital "drug" (well not exactly a drug, but, spoilers you know). I don't recall anything about hackers being able to read binary code by looking at bitmaps, and I'm pretty sure that statement is contradicted by Hiro's skepticism that the binary code in the Snow Crash drug could actually have any effect on a human brain simply by entering the visual cortex.

golden_apples 14y ago

What I actually found most interesting reading back over the book lately was the very 90's take on ethnic balkanization. I don't think that ever really came to pass in the way it was always assumed it was happening at the time, and I think a primary reason for that is the kind of rapidly-changing tech economythat was the backdrop for the story. I'd be really curious to see how a present day retelling if the story would handle this disconnect.

DannoHung 14y ago

Attack the Block was pretty cool! Although spoilerwhen they talk about the phenome of the alien creatures, from a logical perspective it seems rather backwardsspoiler

yk 14y ago

Male Character .... Check Female Character .. Check Nuclear Weapon .... Check => James Bond with iPhones We should just hide the minority report and stop this crime against literature from happening. [Edit] Obviously I should elaborate a bit: Snow Crash is precisely the type of book, where it is really easy to make an disappointing movie. It has enough action scenes to fill 90 minutes without ever mentioning any of the interesting concepts of the book.

cstuder 14y ago

Fun fact: Snow Crash featured a software called 'Earth', a complete 3D view of the earth. Which inspired a company called Keyhole to write something like that. Which got later bought by Google and that product is now known as Google Earth.

CoreDumpling 14y ago
... and which is now building the goggle interface device (Project Glass) that Hiro Protagonist used to great effect. Perhaps the Metaverse will be upon us soon. Will Google take over Second Life?
- bascule 14y ago
  I think Project Glass is probably closer to Manfred Macx's data glasses from Accelerando
- jfoutz 14y ago
  no, they'll take over minecraft. Much better to take a ridiculously simple system where anyone can build anything, and grow it into the full 3d design system of second life.
- mnutt 14y ago
  One of the things that really attracted me was Snow Crash's very 90s idea that your plot of land in the Metaverse was run from your own computer. Of course, it didn't turn out that way and now everything is moving to the cloud.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    Hey, the cloud is always online and my instances are mine. If I were running my website from my computer, it would be down every time I went into the subway.
    - mnutt 14y ago
      Presumably in the future connectivity will be much better than it is now, though I don't deny that there are real benefits of cloud hosting.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

hexagonal 14y ago

That certainly would have been an interesting take on the material, which some believe is essentially unfilmable. Seriously? Snow Crash was supposed to be a comic book, that's why the intro is so strongly visual. The Street, the sword duel on motorcycles, the Burbclaves, the Loglo, etc etc. Some of the deeper themes may be difficult to translate to a 120 minute movie, but that's not the same thing as unfilmable.

ZeroGravitas 14y ago

Some might be more familiar with Joe Cornish as the "Joe" of "Adam & Joe" fame on Channel 4 and Radio 6 music in the UK.

gouranga 14y ago
Didn't realise that. I remember the Adam & Joe Show. That rocked: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGkoBjn9U-c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGkoBjn9U-c

loudmax 14y ago

I really hope they manage to find someone with mixed African/Asian ancestry to play Hiro instead of whitewashing the character. It's not exactly a plot point, but it did give a sense that Protagonist was born ahead of his time.

gouranga 14y ago
As long as it's not Johnny flipping Depp, I'd be happy :) (I agree with you btw).
Turing_Machine 14y ago
At one time I thought Marcus Chong would be ideal but he's too old now. Maybe one of Rae Dawn's kids? They're probably old enough.

jere 14y ago

Probably the most enjoyable time I've had reading a book. And here is my favorite quote: >Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.