In the wake of “Watchmen,” adapted from a notoriously dense piece of popular culture and a nut some think Zack Snyder and company finally cracked this year, Scott Thill at WIRED Magazine is asking what else is out there that’s also “unfilmable.” I personally think the idea of something being “unfilmable” is bullshit. Perhaps as far as faithful adaptation goes, maybe, but cinema is a medium with nearly limitless possibilities, so if you can’t dive in and creatively bridge the gap, you have no business trying to do so in the first place. That’s my view, anyway.
The WIRED list includes a number of the usual suspects, two of them being graphic novels that I would hesitate to consider all that difficult when it comes to adapting this stuff (Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”). Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” tops the user generated rankings, perplexingly. It’s a sci-fi heavy collective, though, so maybe fanboys are just protecting their own.
One of the choices, which gets some dedicated copy, is a challenge I’d love to see some intrepid filmmaker take on — William Gibson’s cyberpunk-birthing “Neuromancer.”