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Snow Crash movie to be written and directed by Joe Cornish
- excuse-me 14y agoClassic - but possibly unfilmable - scifi book Exciting new director - but a budget high enough that it will need the theme park and fast food tie-ins A pitch which probably included phrases like, "it's the Matrix but with samurai swords and girls on skateboards" .... and it will probably be in 3d .......
- pault 14y ago...and now when you tell people you like Neal Stephenson, they'll say "Oh, I saw Snow Crash!", and you'll say "The book is better than the movie", and everyone will think you're a jerk.
- bitwize 14y agoOn the other hand the book will sell like hotcakes in a new shiny-covered reprint with a "Now a Major Motion Picture" banner across the cover.
- pault 14y agoI'm afraid they'll leave out the most interesting parts of the book and make it a dumb action movie. For me, what makes the book great isn't the plot, it's the satire of american suburbia, globalization, and the weird tangents into sumerian mythology and NLP. I hate when they make movies out of my favorite books...
- marquis 14y agoI'd generally agree but as a huge fan of The Diamond Age (which would arguably be easier to film) I hope it brings more people to reading Neal Stephenson.
- bitwize 14y agoYou really think the writer of Attack the Block can't handle weird-ass tangents like in Snow Crash? :)
- illumin8 14y agoThis guy wrote Attack the Block? I hate to say it, but I didn't get that movie. Was I supposed to identify with heroes that are petty street criminals in a gang who like to steal cell phones from innocent people? Sorry, I have a really hard time with movies that glorify the stupidity of a bunch of kids that skip class and become young gangsters.
- papalalu 14y agoyou're right - you didn't get it.
- xutopia 14y agoLook at it from the other perspective. Lots of people will learn about this book because there is a movie about it. The movie should not take away from the fact that books are brilliant.
- planetguy 14y agoSnow Crash is an interesting book, but a deeply flawed one. Stephenson's later books are much better (though after Diamond Age they become too long to film anyway). It is a bit of a dumb action movie, in many ways. A guy with a sword takes on an entire flotilla, if I recall correctly. The coolest moment in the entire book involves somebody saying "I'm sure they'll listen to reason" and then pulling out an enormous gun labelled "REASON". So if the movie turns out to be full of dumb action sequences it'll only be consistent with the book. Another major flaw of the book, as written, is that it has chapters upon chapters of exposition which are basically dialogue scenes between Hiro and the librarian program. Most of the actual overly complicated plot stuff winds up getting explained in these scenes. The third problem with the book is a rather dated view of the future... or by now a rather dated view of the immediate past. Both Hiro and the other dude are reasonably young guys whose fathers fought in World War 2, which puts a fairly stringent limit on how late you can possibly set it (unless you play around with which war it was; I think the fact it was WW2 was fairly vital to the backstory though). Anyway, I'm not against a Snow Crash movie at all, I'm just pointing out that it needs some serious work to be adapted, and that may wind up throwing out some of the bits that many people like best about it.
- JPKab 14y agoI would feel a lot better about it if it was being done by Christopher Nolan. Inception was proof that he doesn't let suits dumb down complex plots. But you have to admit that the opening sequence will at least be awesome: a pizza delivery guy who works for the Mafia flying through an extremely dangerous libertarian dystopia.
- bitwize 14y agoInception was a shaky plot wrapped in enough accidental complexity to make studio execs -- and audiences -- think they were watching something profound. I get a sense of Christopher Nolan as a filmmaker who desperately wants to be taken seriously, which is just the opposite of who we need for Snow Crash. Given his admittedly short body of work (Attack the Block, The Adventures of Tintin), Joe Cornish seems a great choice for handling the action and outragous weird stuff in Snow Crash.
- engtech 14y agoI think Inception, Memento and The Dark Night show that Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker who is taken seriously. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0634240/awards http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0634240/awards
- jmduke 14y agoNolan's made some of the most inventive movies of the past decade. Memento, The Dark Knight, and Inception were pinnacles of the form. I'm not saying he'd be ideal to direct Snow Crash, but your criticisms of his work are unfounded.
- newman314 14y agoI always imagined Hiro's truck looked something like the Batmobile/Tumbler in Batman Begins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tumbler_in_Toronto.JPG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tumbler_in_Toronto.JPG
- sp332 14y agoMore discussion from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4114513 Jon6 points out that an audience today might not realize how cool this all was because (as ynniv puts it) they're seeing it in the future.
- npsimons 14y agoConsidering that one of the cool toys in this story was the inspiration for Google Earth, yeah, most people might not be too impressed. I love the story (love most of Stephenson's works, quirks/"flaws" and all), but it was "20 minutes in the future" when it was released in 1992. Hopefully they'll keep the snarkiness towards capitalism and religion and won't do a whitewash on Hiro or Raven.
- darkarmani 14y agoSo google earth was released soon after 1992?
- sp332 14y agoThe style of writing was near-future, not the actual tech :)
- excuse-me 14y agoYes - odd to think that once the idea of the military being outsourced to Haliburton, 3D city models on your phone/glasses and a cyberspace landgrab for new domain names was in the future.
- mindcrime 14y agoI used to wonder when the cyberpunk future was going to happen. Then I realized it already has.
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- knieveltech 14y agoRev. Wayne's Pearly Gates is going to require some serious refactoring if the studio (and director) want to avoid legions of pissed off fundies protesting at local theaters.
- rabidsnail 14y agoWhy would they want to avoid legions of pissed off fundies protesting? You couldn't buy advertising that good for any amount of money.
- knieveltech 14y agoThere's good and bad publicity, and while the line might be blurred for software startups, it's fairly clear for film studios. Pissing off the conservative crowd in North America comes with some consequences for an entertainment/media company. Case in point: The Golden Compass. The studio was shooting for a $30 million dollar opening weekend. They grossed something like $8.8 mil. You might recall that leading up to the opening there was a lot discussion (and a few calls for protests) surrounding some of the material in the books. Compare/contrast "The Chronicles of Narnia". Both movies had similar budgets and targeted the same audience. Chronicles wasn't burdened by a bunch of controversy and pulled in ~$20 mil on the opening weekend.
- eli 14y agoAccording to Rotten Tomatoes, both critics and audiences thought Chronicles was simply a better movie. Unless you think the critics were somehow swayed by protestors? Seems unlikely. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/his_dark_materials_the_golden_compass/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/his_dark_materials_the_golde... http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chronicles_of_narnia_lion_witch_wardrobe/ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chronicles_of_narnia_lion_wi...
- aidenn0 14y agoThose were movies targeted at least partially at the children/young adult audience. The Snow Crash movie is unlikely to be targeted at the same demographic.
- newman314 14y agoI feel torn about this. On one hand, I'm excited that this is finally being made into a movie but on the other hand, IMO Snow Crash is one of those books which the movie has to faithfully reproduce much like the Lord of the Rings movies. Not knowing much about Joe Cornish, I hope he is able to properly capture the outrageous, over the top parts of the story.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoRelating this back to a recent blog post from Michael Abrash on how and why he got to where he is, the post starts thusly: "It all started with Snow Crash. If I hadn’t read it and fallen in love with the idea of the Metaverse, if it hadn’t made me realize how close networked 3D was to being a reality, if I hadn’t thought I can do that, and more importantly I want to do that, I’d never have embarked on the path that eventually wound up at Valve." http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-what-its-like-and-what-im-doing-2/ http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/valve-how-i-got-here-w...
- voidfiles 14y agoNeal Stephenson is a master of the diatribe. In almost all of his books he takes the time to go into detail on some arcane subject. While I may not be a master after he is done I feel like one. When it comes to a mainstream adaptation I wonder if they will retain the diatribes. It would be really interesting to see how an audience takes to his level of engagement in a specific subject.
- chaostheory 14y agoimo Diamond Age has a much better plot for a movie and is a better book than Snow Crash.
- HarrietJones 14y agoI'll watch this. As long as the main protaganist is some kind of Hero.
- Lambent_Cactus 14y agoI fell like Snow Crash would be much more successful as an animated movie. There's a lot of whimsical, somewhat silly stuff in there that works in a book and could work animated but doesn't translate well to live action.
- drzaiusapelord 14y agoI fully agree. Cyberpunk (or post-cyberpunk nostalgia) will work really well in animated or comic form. Its actually silly to see a guy in a three piece suit run around with a katana or a cyborg girl in a fishnet bodysuit shoot a machinegun at a group of robot assassins. Once you try to make it "gritty" and "real" you end up with clunkers like Hackers or Johnny Mnemonic. I guess you could point out stuff like the Matrix or the recent Batman franchise, but those tend to be the exception not the rule, and to be frank, cater to an almost goth-level of drama and pathos.
- adavies42 14y agowhat about something like _Kill Bill_ that's basically an animated movie that just happens to be live action? (i'm pretty sure it actually had both "a guy in a three piece suit run around with a katana" and "a cyborg girl in a fishnet bodysuit shoot a machinegun at a group of robot assassins".)
- excuse-me 14y agoThere must be coming a cross-over where live actors will be cheaper than animation and it will be easier to make Shrek17 as live than CGI
- ataggart 14y agoOn a related note, when is someone going to make The Moon is a Harsh Mistress into a movie?
- excuse-me 14y agoWhen they can manage to fit a high school full of teenage vampires into the plot ?
- Jtsummers 14y agoCombine it with Time Enough for Love or The Cat Who Walks Through walls and you can have the immortal 30-40 year old looking people, wind the ages down a bit, voila: immortal, time travelling, teenager Lazarus Long encounters a relative and shags them during the struggle for the Moon's liberation from Earth.
- Sthorpe 14y agoWhy isn't Mr. Stephenson writing the script? Doesn't even look like he cares,...which makes me wonder if I should. On another note, Ender's Game is coming out and Orson Scott Card fought hard to get the right actors and write the script. Oh how I can't wait for this....