Starting October 21 on Amazon Prime starring Chloë Grace Moretz, this is the teaser trailer to The Peripheral, based on William Gibson's novel of the same name. Premise:
Flynne Fisher lives in the rural American South, working at the local 3D printing shop, while earning much needed extra money playing VR games for rich people. One night she dons a headset and finds herself in futuristic London—a sleek and mysterious world, alluringly different from her own hardscrabble existence. But this isn’t like any game she’s ever played before: Flynne begins to realize it isn’t virtual reality… it’s real. Someone in London, seventy years in the future, has found a way to open a door to Flynne’s world. And as utterly beguiling as London is... it’s also dangerous.
The plot is a perfect example of how Gibson more or less walked away from writing "science fiction" per se, since the present keeps catching up with any future he might imagine. For example: While a poor person "playing VR games for rich people" might seem like a strange, fantastical notion, Oculus VR founder Palmer Luckey talked with me about that very idea as an actual possibility... 6 years ago.
I also like the "virtual reality" aspect of the series seems to be shot in real life, something Neal Stephenson just talked with me about -- i.e., high-end 3D graphics are so realistic now, you might as well shoot the Metaverse or another virtual world without using CGI:
You know, when we started talking about film adaptation in the 90s, obviously, you think about the state of computer graphics in 1995.
And then imagine making that movie with those graphics. Maybe you make it a little nicer because you're looking into the future but you know, today if we were to watch a 1995 adaptation of Snow Crash, we would be immediately pulled out of the story by the obviously substandard graphics from 27 years ago.
And so, over time, now, we've kind of reached the point where it's not clear that you would even use computer graphics. I mean, you could film actors playing whatever role and just claim that they were photorealistic avatars.
Image copyright Amazon.
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