With the em dashes and the conclusion "This was not called execution. It was called retirement." I expect a lot of people would believe today that these title cards were written by an LLM.
What’s sort of funny about that is there’s a normal thing whenever anyone who hasn’t seen it watches Blade Runner for the first time - often they come out feeling it’s kind of derivative, when the truth is that it feels that way because everything after Blade Runner copied Blade Runner.
Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.
It's been reported that William Gibson saw Blade Runner before releasing Neuromancer and was worried that people would think he stole ideas from Blade Runner, as the aesthetic of Blade Runner was so close to the way he imagined the Neuromancer world. Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.
My favorite example already from the trailers was "the lady wearing mirror shades was already done in the movie Johnny Mnemonic in the 90s" and getting to explain that it is literally the same character. (Johnny Mnemonic was based on a short story that happens around the same time as Neuromancer and the character Molly crosses between the two. I, for one, am hoping the new Apple TV adaptation gives us an excuse to see at least one ex-military dolphin.)
>Now in turn people are worried that the Apple TV adaptation of Neuromancer will feel derivative because so many subsequent works are its hereditary kin.
Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.
I've seen a few people complain that the first trailer for the Neuromancer TV show looks "too bright" or "too clean." I think the real difference is that they're consciously trying to avoid that Blade Runner aesthetic, which includes avoiding the "never get brighter than dusk" trope.
However, I see two problems with this: one, I think people are going to make comparisons to Matrix rather than Blade Runner, and judging from the trailer it looks a lot like a modern Matrix (understandably!). Second, Neuromancer starts with "the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" so the grey/"not sunny" look is kinda baked in and hard to avoid ;)
I'm sure many people have remarked on this before, but the expectation of TV being grey when tuned to a dead channel is probably somewhat unfamiliar to younger readers, who may expect the newer behavior of the TV instead showing a synthesized blue screen, or a textual error message!
I wonder how many people may have read that more recently and thought that the sky was being described as deep, pure blue, rather than a difficult and chaotic grey.
As a note on this, I just reread Neuromancer, and the bulk majority of it takes place in places that are not “high tech/low life” locales. People remember Chiba City, but that’s chapter one, there’s a whole rest of the book after that.
schoen · · focus · HN ↗
roughly · · focus · HN ↗
Add the initial title cards to that list too now, I guess.
mindcrime · · focus · HN ↗
What can ya do?
WorldMaker · · focus · HN ↗
AlanYx · · focus · HN ↗
Neuromancer is particularly vulnerable to this because so much of the original Matrix film is very strongly inspired by Neuromancer, down to reused place names (Zion), the clothing Trinity wears (even the iconic glasses are an alternative to Molly's eye implants), the lobby scene (compare to the Panther Moderns lobby raid), the concept of payphones as a way to cross the boundary between the real and the virtual, etc. I almost have a "memory" of the phone scene in the Istanbul airport in Neuromancer being mirrored in the Matrix movies. It's not actually there, at least not directly, but there's so much overlap between these two that it's an easy false memory.
chipotle_coyote · · focus · HN ↗
the_af · · focus · HN ↗
However, I see two problems with this: one, I think people are going to make comparisons to Matrix rather than Blade Runner, and judging from the trailer it looks a lot like a modern Matrix (understandably!). Second, Neuromancer starts with "the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" so the grey/"not sunny" look is kinda baked in and hard to avoid ;)
schoen · · focus · HN ↗
I wonder how many people may have read that more recently and thought that the sky was being described as deep, pure blue, rather than a difficult and chaotic grey.
roughly · · focus · HN ↗