Story here: Paramount will try adapting Snow Crash for today's cyberpunks
Can’t imagine how the story could be adapted, but I loved AtB.
That is going to be one hard book to adapt. 90% of the charm of Snow Crash was Stephenson’s snidely pedantic commentary. Without the exposition, it’s just going to be a bunch of very weird people doing strange stuff for no apparent reason. I’m not sure how the concept of a neuro-linguistic virus that works both in the real world and cyberspace is going to go over on the big screen.
All I know is that on this news I suspect that Equipoise has zero interest in the movie.
It could be a good movie. Like any movie based on a substantial book, it’s going to leave out a lot of minor details. It’s been a while since I read it, but I think every chapter could be reduced to a reasonable sequence of scenes. I would also expect a lot of time spent on ‘wow’ effects, and some fairly wooden acting from flavor of the month casting. But if you can turn Herman Woulk and Michener works into movies, this one can be done as well.
Yea, I can’t really picture it being a great movie either. Partially, as you say, because a lot of the more interesting ideas are unfilmable and partially because a lot of the ideas that are film-able have long since been used in other movies.
Will read book. Then make judgement.
I don’t care, I’ll see it.
Hoping it goes well and in 12 years they’ll see fit to make a mini-series of The Baroque Cycle.
There’s a lot of sex and violence. Those tend to play well in movies. A lot of the book’s appeal though was in its futurism, particularly its introduction of the concept of computer avatars* and the blurring of “Second Life” type virtual worlds with real life. Now that people are already used to those ideas, they won’t seem so innovative.
- IIRC, Snow himself showed some pre-Snow Crash examples of “avatar” being used in the sense of a online representation of oneself, but I still credit him with popularizing it.
They should make a movie out of just the first chapter. I would totally go to see that.
IMO, it will probably suck. It has all of the usual problems of trying to adapt a huge book to film - mainly leaving out 95% of it, so what’s left doesn’t really make sense.
Plus the problems already mentioned of trying to adapt that particular subject matter and style to screen.
Hell, they screwed up Johnny Mnemonic, and that was a story that I’d been waiting for years to see someone adapt. That story was absolutely dying to be brought to the screen. And they ruined it completely.
I second MsWhatsit’s suggestion, though.
Not only that, but the notion of a geographically fixed cyberspace itself is going to go over like a lead balloon to a post-Internet audience.
I remember writing about it back when I first read the book - how the pre-internet notion that “to access Google from MySpace, non-hackers will have to take the bus or “walk” three blocks in this direction” is almost fantastical in how much it didn’tpredict the future of computing in any recognizable shape or form.
But yeah, agreed, unless they plan on just stopping the movie at random points to let Stephenson do an 10 minutes long voice-over on how to eat Cap’n Crunch, it won’t work as an adaptation :). (no, wait, that particular one was in *Cryptonomicon *wasn’t it ?)
I’m stoked! Unless the reviews are terrible, I’ll definitely go see it, if only for the Rat Things.
Yes. 
I agree with your point, though.
I’m thinking Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones as Raven, Chloe Moretz as Y.T., and Jin from Lost as Hiro.
I’m also wondering if we’re going to see the vagina dentata.
I’ll go watch it.
I do hope the producers do decide to put in a proper ending though. Oh and they have to make good use of ‘Reason’ (though even reading the book I thought that was a convoluted means of having that punchline!) 
The first thing I’ve always wondered about in making a movie is the timeline of it.
It’s set in a post-Reagan world where not only Reagan, but clowns like Ed Meese are the dominant Federal inflated currency honorees (“Ed Meeses” and “Gippers”). So many problems with all that, including that a futuristic US would print huge denominations. Cash is so 20th century.
Hiro Protagonist and Raven are both children of WWII vets. And Hiro ain’t all that old. Key plot point concerning their fathers. They’d at least have to bump it up a generation. (The Mafia soldiers would have to be Afghan/Iraq vets.) But then the whole collapse of the USSR, loose nukes, subs and aircraft carriers part would seem less realistic.
Based on recent books converted into movies I’ve seen, there is a large tendency to just trash a whole lot of it and put in entirely new, unrelated stuff. Sometimes they just want to use the title and a few character names. Expect a substantially different entity from the book.
I don’t expect this to go well. Uncle Enzo will not be happy, and you don’t want to make Uncle Enzo mad.
laugh
He’s writing and directing. Now I have to forget about this great news, since, assuming everything goes as planned, it won’t even be released for a couple of years. I don’t want to be highly anticipating something this far in advance, I’ll wear myself out.