Neuromancer to be adapted for film

What!? This has apparently been out there floating around on the interwebs since May. Here are a couple of tidbits from JoBlo.com:

“Producer Peter Hoffman will essentially make the movie as a $70 million indie. Director Joseph Kahn, whose only feature to date is… Torque, will bring Gibson’s prophetic vision of cyberspace to screens” [via]

“Hayden Christensen will star in NEUROMANCER as Case, the former hacker at the center of the story.” [via]

I have to be honest here: This all makes me feel somewhat sick. My stomach is filled with that toxic feeling you get when something very good is on the verge of going very bad. Gibson is one of my favorite authors and Neuromancer is the novel that started it all. It’s a book I hold very dear to my heart. My initial thoughts:

The Bad | Joseph Kahn is a commercial and music video director whose only other film so far is an action flick called Torque (2004) starring, amongst others, Ice Cube. Now I only just added Torque to my NetFlix que given this recent news, so I can’t speak from experience, but its safe to say the film has not made much of an impression (it scores a 41 on MetaCritic). From what I’ve read it’s basically a B or C motorcycle chase movie hopped up on Mountain Dew and a heavy dose of computer aided hysterics. I’ve read good and bad about his direction in the movie. Some say it’s highly technical and shows promise, others say he’s basically a mini-Michael Bay. I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve seen it.

The Good | I was watching the “making-of” documentary included in Blade Runner: The Final Cut last week and guess who makes a brief appearance? Yup, Joseph Kahn. He joins a host of other directors who talk about how Blade Runner affected them as a directors. At first I was like “Who the hell is Joseph Kahn and why should I care what he thinks about Blade Runner?”, but he actually spoke quite eloquently and I didn’t think much else of it. I’m not sure when they taped his piece for the documentary or even how long he’s known he’d be directing Neuromancer, but it definitely eases my anxiety some that Kahn is a fellow Blade Runner fanatic.

… And The Verdict Is Still Out On… | Hayden Christensen as Case. I think this could go either way. I liked him in Life as a House and thought he was OK in Shattered Glass but found him almost unwatchable in the Star Wars Episodes I-III.

In any case, the movie is slated for 2009, so I guess I’ll have to calm down and just wait it out. Stay tuned for any news as it happens.