I just learned that a movie is planned to be made of Snow Crash. I love the book, so I don’t know how to feel about that — it could be great. It could be a flop. It could be a catastrophe (one of the main characters is an unabashed sexually active teenager, opening opportunities to attract an unpleasant fan base).
Not that it matters. I’ll still like the book.
Given that the book is a mess and all over the place tonally, I don’t think there’s a good way to turn it into a film.
Love the book, but gotta agree with remyporter. I think it works in the book (at least, for me), but in a movie, those shifts would probably be too glaring. At least, if a movie sticks close to the book. There is always the possibility that they just take the world, and some of the characters and story elements, but jettison a lot of the weirdness and elements, as is often done with movie adaptations of scifi books.
By the way, that article is from 2012, and while the movie is still present as “announced” on IMDB, the status is “script”. So yah, don’t hold your breath on it ever coming out.
@remyporter, never fear, I have faith that Hollywood will give the film direction.
A circle is a direction, right?
I mean, read Starship Troopers, then watch the film. Whatever could go wrong? ;)
I’d see it for the first scene alone if they can nail that.
Thart article is 8 years old, have there been more recent announcements?
@5 Lars, I found this, which says the movie idea is kind of dead, but HBO is trying to do the book as a series instead. https://deadline.com/2019/12/snow-crash-sci-fi-drama-series-hbo-max-michael-bacall-joe-cornish-paramount-tv-1202809103/
I adore Snow Crash, especially as drivenb4 said, the first scene. But, there’s an awful lot of gore (I’m so not interested) and it lacks narrative skill and resolution. Once everyone gets onto the Raft, the plot dissolves into just repeated scenes of various people killing each other, instead of the wit of the beginning of the book.
Yeah, so don’t know if I’d bother to watch, without a lot of good reviews first. And something recent, I really couldn’t say what:), has put me off of HBO dramatized series of good books.
Re-read it recently – it’s aged weirdly, in that some things that were wildly ridiculous when it was written are astonishingly plausible now, but other parts of it are still wildly ridiculous and we know that Neal Stephenson was not in fact writing a parody of cyberpunk.
I don’t know how you’d adapt it, because arguably its tone never worked but especially now, with the gig economy and the prospect of America’s collapse, it’ll be hard to balance the stuff that’s taken as serious with the intensely goofy parts of the book.
If they’re not doing a cinematic version of “Anathem” then they are wrong.
I always take those announcements with a grain of salt. Maybe this could be made with animation (imagine the motorcycle).
I remember an announcement of another favorite of mine, “The Stars My Destination”, which book has a real long scene in pitch darkness!
But we have to remember, books and movies are different. Making a good movie from a great book doesn’t mean filming it accurately.