In 1981, author William Gibson introduced OMNI magazine readers to ‘the Sprawl.’ A catastrophically dense, cable ridden dystopia that served as the foundations for the cyberpunk genre. Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, took readers not just through outer space but cyberspace, a new universe laying dormant in the code of nascent computer processors. For more than 40 years, this influential work was considered “unfilmable.” Now Apple TV is taking on the supposedly impossible, with the trailer for their adaptation dropping at San Diego Comic-Con.
Neuromancer follows disgraced hacker Case, who had his central nervous system fried by the Yakuza after biting more than he can chew. Just as he had settled into a life of squalor, he’s visited by former military brass Armitage and street samurai Molly Millions. The two offer to restore Case’s brain and ability to jack-in to cyberspace on the condition that he aids them with a high stakes heist. It goes without saying there’s much Armitage is withholding about the caper, which takes the ragtag crew across space colonies, servers, and face to face with ghosts dormant in the machine.
Apple’s upcoming series sees Green Room and Fantastic Beasts‘ Callum Turner as Case, The Inheritance‘s Briana Middleton as Molly and The Kingsmen‘s Mark Strong, uncharacteristically donning hair, as Armitage. The debut trailer offers a glimpse at these not-so-smooth operators courting disaster as they comb the criminal underworld and pierce the computer landscape. It seems to strike a nice balance between expected tenants of cyberpunk aesthetic without getting completely wasted on neon signs.
The series is the latest in a long line of attempted adaptations, with so many failed productions that many critics deemed the high tech psycho-odyssey “unfilmable.” In 2010, Cube director Vincenzo Natali announced his own ambitious Neuromancer, which sadly never caught traction beyond some interesting concept art. For decades, the most we got was a surprisingly good, star studded video game from Interplay, an excellent BBC Radio play and the ‘90s Keanu vehicle Johnny Mnemonic, which took a number of liberties with the text.
This Neuromancer makes its way through your preferred computer terminal in January 2027, led by Jack Ryan showrunner Graham Roland and Sleight director JD Dillard. Curiously the Wikipedia page lists Drake as executive producer, because cyberpunk is ultimately Canada’s gift to you.