Please, I dearly hope this doesn't all go horribly wrong.
In Neuromancer, the main character Case has killed people in dirty meaningless fights, he’s a self-destructive drug addict, running himself into the ground, barely eating, and trying to convince the city streets to open up and swallow him in a dark alley one night. This character is a vortex of self-loathing, and I just don’t see many actors who would want to try and do that in a science-fiction film. I’ve spent fifteen years getting to know the character and seven years writing about it, so in this regard I feel that I know Case pretty well.
Does that character description fit with Hayden Christensen in your head? He’s most famous for playing Anakin Skywalker (who became Darth Vader) in the second and third of the Star Wars series. In fairness to Christensen, in the Star Wars films he (allegedly) went to Lucas and said ‘Are you sure you want Anakin to be this whiny?’ and Lucas said ‘No, make him more whiny!’. With direction like that the it’s hard to do much. While Christensen may yet display previously unseen depths of acting and character in his performance as Case, he’s not yet shown that he is capable of portraying the complexity of the part. I really hope he surprises us, and I’ll be the first to stand applauding if he does.
Christensen might be able to pull it off with good direction, but the director attached to the project, Joseph Kahn, doesn’t give me a lot of hope on that one. He’s best known for the very dumb action film Torque (currently rated at 3.4 out of 10, barely skimming out of the worst rated 100 films on IMDB) and the Britney Spears video for the song ‘Toxic’. The story of Neuromancer is fairly complex, with multiple antagonists with differing agendas, which is partly why this film hasn’t ever happened yet despite 20 years of people trying to make it. I’m very concerned that they are going to strip it back to a pile of meaningless action sequences.
If they made this film feel like a drunk hurriedly stumbling home through the bad area of town, people hurrying past and predatory eyes watching the progress from shadows, then it would feel right. It’s more likely to feel like a glossy jet-bike ride, and that’s going to be a huge betrayal of the book. Christensen’s casting feels like the jet-bike version of the story, and that’s why the people who want this film to be good are so worried about him.
Neuromancer is one of the classic novels of the late twentieth century, it made the word 'cyberspace' famous by pretty much inventing the idea of virtual reality. It was written by William Gibson and is credited with influencing vast amounts of modern culture, from direct effects on science fiction all the way through to how early developers of the internet thought about the future. I wrote my PhD about William Gibson, which is why I'm so interested in this.
So, who do you think would be good for the part? Johnny Depp is too old, so is Edward Norton. Christian Bale is too pretty. Someone like Ewan McGregor possibly could do it, if he went back to his junkie look from Trainspotting.
Also, who should be the killer bodyguard Molly? That one could be played with a bit more because her character isn't quite so difficult. A typically pretty-girl actress could be really entertaining playing a vicious killer. I'd really want her to have a decent number of scars, and the mirrorshades permanently (literally) attached to her head really kill the possibility for her being conventionally good looking, so it would be a lot of fun to have someone cool and then cover their best assets. Angelina Jolie is possibly to old now, but I think someone completely tangential like Claire Danes could be really interesting.