Yeah, and I came here to mention this, as I tried to watch it and got 4-5 episodes in before giving up.
Some of it was really frickin cool, and you can even feel some of William Gibson voice shine through into the world.
I probably want this to work more than anybody, but even for me the show was just unwatchable. So often the characters get nothing to do, nothing to say, it's nobody's job to create narrative momentum. It's just brutal.
That said, I'm still not deterred from wanting to watch necromancer just because I want that type of show to work. A show where technology isn't just window dressing, and there's real curiosity about how it impacts the world, and there's real imagination about how to extract original and interesting visual aesthetics from it.
I'll offer an opposing viewpoint that the show was totally watchable and not "brutal" for me. Some of the acting/story was a bit over the top, but overall still a pretty good show and interesting idea. I've read Neuromancer but wouldn't say I'm a William Gibson expert/fan, so maybe the show is more appealing to the average viewer like me.
I was enjoying the show a lot, and liked to watch it all the way to the end, but for the second half I felt like I was just watching a series of scenes that I liked, not a coherent story. I couldn't make heads or tails of why what was happening, was indeed happening. I chalked it up to being tired at night, and made a note to rewatch sometime soon, but now I have doubts...
I mean, this is more or less how I felt reading the first quarter to half of The Peripheral. Each chapter (scene) seemed disconnected and out of context, even once I understood the two time periods.
And it's a legitimate criticism of the books. Fidelity to substance of the original is one thing, execution is another. I think the weaknesses of the books as transposed to film, combined with poor execution of craft are what make one different from the other.
Isn't that kind of appropriate, though? You create a world where there are enormous technological and sociological forces that are outside of your characters' control, and those forces change who the characters are. That's a big part of the point.
It's about characters, technology trends and plot details that are a thousand times more specific. The execution of it is bad, and it's only through extremely lazy equivocation that those two things can be said to be the same.
The "go ahead, take some of this money" scene is bone-crushingly stupid, just for one and it's one of a raft of examples of the dialog is so lacking in any world building detail or signal of character motivations.
The greatest credit I can give it is that it fails in an interesting way, and doesn't fail from lack of interest in source material. And I'd rather live in a world full of shows that fail in interesting ways than ones that successfully execute familiar and shallow "is technology bad?" themes over and over.
Some of it was really frickin cool, and you can even feel some of William Gibson voice shine through into the world.
I probably want this to work more than anybody, but even for me the show was just unwatchable. So often the characters get nothing to do, nothing to say, it's nobody's job to create narrative momentum. It's just brutal.
That said, I'm still not deterred from wanting to watch necromancer just because I want that type of show to work. A show where technology isn't just window dressing, and there's real curiosity about how it impacts the world, and there's real imagination about how to extract original and interesting visual aesthetics from it.