William Gibson’s proto-cyberpunk novel Neuromancer is one of those books I have no real wish to see lifted to the screen. Not to preserve my own love for the book, which has finer points, but isn’t any significant favorite. Rather, like past efforts to make Gibson’s stuff come alive onscreen, it’s that a Neuromancer film seems likely to miss the point with such blatant glee that the deficiency would be obvious to any audience. Really, outside of Philip K Dick is any body of speculative fiction more likely to come out bland and homogenous?
But the details of the current potential film version, which JoBlo has reported on a few times, are interesting. Made more or less as a $70M indie with Torque director Joseph Kahn in charge, this is a weird beast. Cursory checks show nothing like a finalized script or even credited screenwriter, so even if this is happening, it’s now a ways off.
Which makes it a bit odd that JoBlo’s source is now pegging Hayden Christensen as the star of the flick. He’s been a non-entity since Shattered Glass and may continue to be so after Jumper opens, so how is this happening? Or is that what we said when Keanu was cast in Johnny Mnemonic?
I don’t recall enough of the book to say that Christensen is specifically a good or bad fit for Case, the original hacker protagonist, but since Christensen has generally proven a bad fit for anything that involves expression, this might not be a popular choice.