

Attack the Block’s Joe Cornish To Direct Cyberpunk Classic Snow Crash - waterlesscloud
http://badassdigest.com/2012/06/14/attack-the-blocks-joe-cornish-to-direct-cyberpunk-classic-snow-crash/

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cstuder
Fun fact: Snow Crash featured a software called 'Earth', a complete 3D view of
the earth. Which inspired a company called Keyhole to write something like
that. Which got later bought by Google and that product is now known as Google
Earth.

~~~
CoreDumpling
... and which is now building the goggle interface device (Project Glass) that
Hiro Protagonist used to great effect.

Perhaps the Metaverse will be upon us soon. Will Google take over Second Life?

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mnutt
One of the things that really attracted me was Snow Crash's very 90s idea that
your plot of land in the Metaverse was run from your own computer. Of course,
it didn't turn out that way and now everything is moving to the cloud.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Hey, the cloud is always online and my instances are mine. If I were running
my website from my computer, it would be down every time I went into the
subway.

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mnutt
Presumably in the future connectivity will be much better than it is now,
though I don't deny that there are real benefits of cloud hosting.

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NathanKP
Snow Crash is quite a classic book. It was actually one of the books that got
me interested in coding/hacking. Anyone here who hasn't read it should do so
right away.

I'll be interested to see if Joe Cornish is able to pull off the technical
aspects of the movie without it appearing too fake.

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jere
Probably the most enjoyable time I've had reading a book. And here is my
favorite quote:

>Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the
right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I
moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten
years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself
to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to
wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being
bad. Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way,
this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest
motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.

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aero142
It's been a few years since I read it, but I remember Snow Crash being filled
will about 100 pages of explanation about the development of language in
Mesopotamia and the basis of the plot still didn't make any sense. I'm
concerned how the movie is going to approach this in 2 hours.

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sp332
As long as they have the scene where Hiro is piloting a boat through Rife's
Raft using real-time satellite views in one eye, I'll be happy.

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loudmax
I really hope they manage to find someone with mixed African/Asian ancestry to
play Hiro instead of whitewashing the character. It's not exactly a plot
point, but it did give a sense that Protagonist was born ahead of his time.

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Turing_Machine
At one time I thought Marcus Chong would be ideal but he's too old now. Maybe
one of Rae Dawn's kids? They're probably old enough.

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hexagonal

      That certainly would have been an interesting take on the 
      material, which some believe is essentially unfilmable.
    

Seriously? Snow Crash was supposed to be a comic book, that's why the intro is
so strongly visual. The Street, the sword duel on motorcycles, the Burbclaves,
the Loglo, etc etc.

Some of the deeper themes may be difficult to translate to a 120 minute movie,
but that's not the same thing as _unfilmable._

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golden_apples
What I actually found most interesting reading back over the book lately was
the very 90's take on ethnic balkanization. I don't think that ever really
came to pass in the way it was always assumed it was happening at the time,
and I think a primary reason for that is the kind of rapidly-changing tech
economythat was the backdrop for the story.

I'd be really curious to see how a present day retelling if the story would
handle this disconnect.

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TwiztidK
I'm still waiting for the mini-series adaptation of The Diamond Age, which I
preferred to Snow Crash, that has been "in the making" for something like five
years now.

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yk

      Male Character .... Check
      Female Character .. Check
      Nuclear Weapon .... Check
      => James Bond with iPhones
    

We should just hide the minority report and stop this crime against literature
from happening.

[Edit] Obviously I should elaborate a bit: Snow Crash is precisely the type of
book, where it is really easy to make an disappointing movie. It has enough
action scenes to fill 90 minutes without ever mentioning any of the
interesting concepts of the book.

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ZeroGravitas
Some might be more familiar with Joe Cornish as the "Joe" of "Adam & Joe" fame
on Channel 4 and Radio 6 music in the UK.

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gouranga
Didn't realise that. I remember the Adam & Joe Show. That rocked:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGkoBjn9U-c>

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joejohnson
>>"Hiro Protagonist – that’s the character’s name – a computer hacker/samurai
swordsman/pizza delivery driver who investigates and tries to stop the
takeover of postmodern civilization."

That is not a complete sentence.

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FreakLegion
It's obviously an accidental omission. But just to play Devil's advocate, _not
complete_ isn't the same as _not correct_. For example, in this case we could
just as well be looking at an appositive[1], making the sentence a perfectly
well-formed answer to, say, the question "Who's the main character?"

1\. <http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/appositive.htm>

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mdanger
Interesting news - one wonders who they'll get for Hiro.

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aaronbrethorst
I don't think there are many (any?) African-American/Korean actors out there.

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te
Is that an autostereogram?

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mistercow
I wondered this briefly as well, but can assure you that it is not. They
resolve almost instantly for me, so I fortunately don't have to spend 10
minutes wondering if something is just noise.

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Jtsummers
That image makes sense in the context of the book. In particular, in the book
skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from what otherwise looks like
binary noise just by looking at it.

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mistercow
I've read the book, so I knew that it shouldn't be an autostereogram. But
checking is kind of an automatic procedure when I see an image like that.

>In particular, in the book skilled hackers are able to discern meaning from
what otherwise looks like binary noise just by looking at it.

Erm, that's not really what the image is a reference too. The noise is what
the titular "snow crash" looks like when you use a particular digital "drug"
(well not exactly a drug, but, spoilers you know). I don't recall anything
about hackers being able to read binary code by looking at bitmaps, and I'm
pretty sure that statement is contradicted by Hiro's skepticism that the
binary code in the Snow Crash drug could actually have any effect on a human
brain simply by entering the visual cortex.

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Jtsummers
So I didn't want to include too many spoilers, but one element of the book was
the ability of hackers to intuit meaning from binary because of their level of
familiarity with computer code. That is, show them a hex stream and they
should be able to read the ascii it contains. That's not wholey unreasonable,
I can look at the data I'm currently writing tools for and pick out the time
by connecting 12 bits split up and spread over 84 bytes.

The book takes it to the point that binary images, static to non-hackers, to
hackers contains meaning (though not consciously), permitting the information
contained (subconcious memes/instructions) to be spread via images, rewriting
their minds. The images to everyone else look like static or the "snow crash".

The whole thing lacks seriousness. A character named Hiro Protagonist is the
protaganist of the adventure. It's filled with action/pulp goodness, not a
serious treatise on the capabilities of interstellar memes and the effect of
language on the human mind. Some magical incantation in a language no one in
the present has ever heard, but that is apparently genetically programmed into
our minds, permits anyone to be controlled by commands in the language. If
that's allowed, why not let static convey it as well? And the
language/commands returned in the form of signals from space?

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Codhisattva
Best news of the day!

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objclxt
I wouldn't get too excited...it's been in development hell pretty much since
the book was published. God knows how many writers have actually had a go at
it, but I'm willing to bet a dozen or so (usually when a director gets
attached they re-write the script with their preferred screenwriter).

You end up with this situation where the studio _has_ to release something,
because they've spent so much money buying the options, paying for ump-teen
rewrites, etc. Studios don't account this as a 'loss', since in theory they
will make the money back when the film is released. There comes a point in
development hell where you have to release _something_ , because either a)
your losses on the film are at a point where you can't keep rolling them over,
or b) your options are going to expire - and if you're the studio executive
who decides not to make the film and commit that loss to paper you can bet you
won't be with the studio for much longer.

The best case is you end up with something like Watchmen (which had been in
development for about 20 years and had half a dozen big name directors
attached, like Gilliam and Aronofsky). The final result is a reasonable film,
although one that doesn't really compare to the source material and is fairly
quickly forgotten. The worst case is the film doesn't get made (although if
you're passionate about the source material you might argue this was the best
case all along).

This is a big simplification - in true Hollywood style, it's a lot more
complex (Snow Crash actually bounced from Paramount to Disney and back again -
the fact Disney was unable to do anything with it isn't really a good sign).
What you can pretty much guarantee is that at the end of it you end up with a
film that's average at best. It's a vicious cycle: say Joe Cornish writes a
great script, but Paramount insist on some rewrites. Joe Cornish then has to
drop out, because the rewrites cause the schedule to clash with another
project. Another director comes on, and he insists on new rewrites to
accomodate his style. Etc, etc etc.

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waterlesscloud
Yeah, it's a tossup if this works out or not.

I'm guessing this came about because Cornish had a movie that did quite well
with the geek critics, if not the box office. So he probably got some meetings
off that and they asked him what he wanted to do next. He said Snow Crash,
they figured why not, it's just sitting there, and here we are. This is all
conjecture on my part, but it seems likely.

Still, it's good to see it's floating to the surface again.

Now, if Neuromancer would ever actually happen...

EDIT: Lorenzo Di Bonaventura signed on to produce Neuromancer last month.
That's a big deal, it might really get made.
[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-arts-and-prodigy-
pict...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/seven-arts-and-prodigy-pictures-
announce-lorenzo-di-bonaventura-to-join-production-team-of-
neuromancer-2012-04-30)

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jon6
I just finished snow crash a week ago, I found it pretty mediocre.

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jfoutz
Snow crash is a terrible book. It is, imho, a fantastic collection of
vignettes with the same characters that are vaguely related. Some of them are
simple decapitation scenes featuring beer and vr googles, while others are
deeper questions about the value of pay toilets.

snow crash was impressive, to me, because of the sheer quantity of new
concepts, tightly integrated. Stephenson created a plausible future that dealt
with what people would deal with in all conceptual scales, from highfalutin
cultural organization of government and religion all the way down to teenagers
interests in food and clothing. I feel, he did a pretty great job of avoiding
the mundane that's pretty much the same as today, while highlighting stuff
that's different, like skate wheels.

Snowcrash is a cartoon, it is a caricature of a future with new stuff. It's
not a good book, not like coherent like Vonnegut, or even Stephenson's
Cryptonomicon, but it is indeed a window to the future. Neromancer was written
on a typewriter, and snowcrash was written in flatland.

~~~
jere
>Snowcrash is a cartoon, it is a caricature of a future with new stuff.

Obviously. I'm struggling to understand why this is a problem.

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DannoHung
Attack the Block was pretty cool!

Although _spoiler_ when they talk about the phenome of the alien creatures,
from a logical perspective it seems rather backwards _spoiler_

