ericalm wrote:
None of them would! Stephenson and Gibson have pretty much gone beyond that straight up cyberpunk stuff anyways. (Stephenson's so freakin' good I'm actually considering re-realing the 3,000-ish page Baroque Cycle!)
I thought of that. This has more to do with storytelling than the cyberpunk genre. I named those guys because they are gifted storytellers with a respect, or at least understanding, of the audience. Jack Womack would have been another good one.
Any screenwriter would be in the unfortunate position of having to create a compelling and somewhat believable story out of something that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Worse, they may have had to try to make sense of t he original to put it into a new context.
I agree; it's a crap job for the screenwriter. This is why he needs an actual writer, a....navigator, if you will.
I suppose what I would have liked to see was the reverse of how "The Abyss" was novelized. Rather than handing a hack SF author a screenplay with a directive to write the book, they actually had Orson Scott Card on-set during the filming. He worked not only with James Cameron, but the actors themselves to create the backstory and fill in motivations and inner narratives. It remains one of my favorite books, ever.
Taking the approach of novelizing T:L - or at least creating a prosaic narrative and then deconstructing it for the screen might have been tedious or expensive, but I do think it would have yielded an ultimately more satisfying experience. T:L, at it's core, is a very cold movie. It's supposed to be at points, but it never thaws out.
Not having seen T:L yet, I'm guessing they did what they could. At best, if they were going to bring in someone else, it should have probably been a script doctor to punch up dialogue and help with some plot points. Joss Whedon has done this for several action & sci-fi flicks and probably would have been a good choice for this.
True, and I agree. Whedon generally has a gift for humanizing otherwise inhuman stock characters.
I'm hoping this isn't Avatar all over: a senseless piece of junk dressed up as something more. I can appreciate the differences between popcorn blockbuster entertainment and more serious fare. Hell, Ghostbusters is one of my favorite movies and I will watch Independence Day (a pretty dumb, flawed and still awesome movie) or the first Back to the Future movies any time they're on and I'm bored. But our blockbusters have been getting worse and worse, even as the effects get better and better. The past few years have had a lot of disappointments.
Sadly, I think it's Avatar-ish in that context, but Cameron made Avatar for a specific audience, just as T:L was. If they ever do the "Halo" movie it will likely be the same; many flaws forgiven by the fan base because of the extant whole.
Tron:Legacy is cranking out more than $6M in box office per frikking day - every day of the week! T:L cruised by the $100M domestic box office mark this week and just keeps on cranking out $6M in domestic b.o. per day. Unbelievable! 
