Joe Cornish To Direct Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
We're praying to the gods of celluloid and good storytelling that Hollywood doesn’t screw this up.
Deadline announced on Thursday that Joe Cornish, director of "Attack the Block", has been tapped as the guy who will be bringing my all-time favorite book, Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel "Snow Crash", to the silver screen. I hold this book in very high regard, and since I heard the news Ive been filled with the same type of angst that Watchmen fans must have been filled with when they heard the news of a movie for that similarly unfilmable property. Although being made for Paramount Pictures with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall producing is a pretty good start, Snow Crash is a hell of a dense book that if done right will require a hefty budget, a whole whack of state-of-the-art effects and a runtime of probably 150 minutes to fit everything in. If you havent read it yet, youre doing yourself a huge disservice, as author Neal Stephenson has created an adventure in a world thats different from our own yet described in such vivid detail that we can easily imagine it in the not-too-distant future. One could argue that it heavily borrows elements from other sci-fi/cyberpunk fiction, but it weaves them together in a thick, gnarly story that emerges as something entirely new. In the book, our not-too-subtly named hero, Hiro Protagonist pizza delivery boy, samurai swordsman and worlds greatest hacker is stunned when the avatar of a friend is infected with a computer virus (or is it a drug?) in the Metaverse, an immersive version of the internet where he spends most of his time. When this results in his friend lapsing into a coma in the real world, Hiro teams up with a young skateboard kourier (with a k) named YT to find out where the virus came from and, no surprise, stumbles onto a vast and deadly conspiracy with elements of to quote Wikipedia history, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, religion, computer science, politics, cryptography, memetics and philosophy. That doesnt even begin to do the intricate plot justice, but you get the idea. As I said, this is a dense read, with a number of set pieces that would just blow your socks off if you saw them on an IMAX screen: YT harpooning cars with an electromagnetic tether and surfing down the highway on her smartwheel-enabled skateboard; deadly biomechanical rat thing security robots that move so fast you wont notice them until theres a hole in your chest; sword and gun battles aboard a city built of yachts and rafts tied to a private aircraft carrier; and a 60,000 mph motorcycle chase in the Metaverse that ends with a logic bomb going off at a rock concert attended by millions of screaming avatars. As for casting, well thats a hard one. In the book Hiro is around 30 years old and of Korean/Black descent, while YT is a 15-year old 21st century version of an early 90s Gwen Steffani. Hiros race will probably be glossed over in the movie, but for some reason Ive always imagined John Cho when I read the book (Did you know hes 40? Dude looks 25). For YT, I imagine that current it-girl Chloe Moretz could readily pull off the right mix of street-smart indignation and punk rock authority to do the role justice. The big casting question is the storys hulking, Aleut bad guy, Raven. This is how the book describes him: 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... 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.I used to think Vin Diesel would be a good fit for this (say what you will about his acting chops, but Riddick is still one of the most badass characters our there), but by now hes gone a bit too...Vin Diesel-y? Two other names popped into my mind Danny Trejo (although hes a bit old for the role) and Kevin Durand. Its a tough call what do you think? At any rate, I will be following this story closely, and Im praying to the gods of celluloid and good storytelling that Hollywood doesnt screw this up.