Welcome to the Chatsubo. Say hi to Ratz, the bartender with the pink prosthetic arm. Order your draft Kirin. Mind your own biz.
Apple TV Plus just released the first official look at its upcoming science fiction show, Neuromancer, an adaptation of the 1980s William Gibson novel that kicked off the cyberpunk movement.
The teaser is only 26 seconds long, and the “action” is less than 10 seconds. We see the inside of a low-ceilinged space lit by a single arched window. A pinball machine flickers to life. One by one, the other lights come on, and a neon sign proclaims “Bar Chatsubo.”
The Chat, as it’s called in the book, is the bar where we first meet our protagonist, Case (played by Callum Turner). Case is a former console cowboy (hacker) who’s had his nerves damaged, cutting off his access to cyberspace (a word Gibson coined in the early 1980s). Case’s luck turns around when he meets Molly (played by Briana Middleton), an assassin with blades under her fingernails and mirror lenses fused across her eyes.
If that sounds a little derivative of Cyberpunk 2077, it’s probably the other way around: Neuromancer did it first. The book debuted in 1984, and there have since been many failed attempts to adapt it as a movie or TV show. (It’s not exactly easy to visualize Gibson’s description of cyberspace: “Bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.”)
But the ideas in Neuromancer have trickled down through the decades. Its hackers described cyberspace as “the matrix” 15 years before the movie that popularized the phrase. (Trinity in The Matrix is basically the same character as Molly, minus the razorblades.) Case is an addict who can’t bear to spend too much time jacked out of cyberspace — much like how you and I are probably addicted to the internet today.
It’s been a long time coming, but here it is now: Our first glimpse of what will finally be a fully realized adaptation of Neuromancer. Here’s hoping that Apple TV Plus does it justice.
