Neuromancer might just get made after all

“If it can be imagined, it can be filmed,” is a quote often attributed to Stanley Kubrick. In recent years, film-makers have proved him both right and wrong. Last year, I felt Zack Snyder made a more than decent bash of bringing the dense and multi-stranded Watchmen to the big screen, while in the past decade we’ve even seen The Lord of the Rings, once considered too long and flowery for Hollywood, turned into a blockbuster trilogy by Peter Jackson. On the other hand, critical reaction to Tom Tykwer’s 2006 adaptation of the decidedly unfilmic Perfume: The Story of a Murderer was pretty mixed, and neither Joseph Strick’s 1967 attempt, nor Sean Walsh’s Bloom in 2004 really got under the skin of James Joyce’s Ulysses, surely the ultimate unfilmable novel.

“Many a case has also been made for Neuromancer, the 1984 William Gibson novel which popularised terms such as cyberspace and the matrix, being impossible to adapt for the big screen. According to reports this week, we may be about to discover the verity of those arguments. In an interview with io9.com, Vincenzo Natali, director of cult sci-fi brainteaser Cube, as well as the forthcoming Splice, revealed he has Gibson’s blessing, and is about to start work on the project…”

Read more: Is William Gibson’s Neuromancer too vast for the big screen?
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