Surrogates
Surrogates might be a mishmash of every sci-fi film in the last decades, but then it takes large cues from Snow Crash too.
It’s The Future and James Cromwell (it’s always him) is a scientist that invented some sort of society-changing tech. That tech is an avatar, a robot with some skin controlled with an Oculus Rift on steroids.
Touted as solving racism and any other social maladies, since your avatar can be whatever you want. Just like Snow Crash, everyone just goes for the cheap Barbie and Ken models, customization is expensive and/or hard work. Again, just like in real life, fat male slobs all have female porn star avatars to flirt with each other. There’s a kind of techno bong/dildo that zaps you with some kind of pleasure rays.
The plot is set in motion with an operator is killed over his avatar. That completely defeats the point of having a disposable body and staying at home all day pantless.
There’s also “Dreads”, neo-Luddites that see the whole thing as an affront to our communion with nature. They live on some kind of fully sovereign Franchulates (just like Snow Crash). Lead by Ving Rhames doing his best Samuel L Jackson impression, playing a hippie crossed with Southern preacher.
Towards the end, they noticed their budget was not being used because they actually let Rosamund Pike act, so they brought out the explosions and the twists.
Gamer is a more visceral version of this idea, but the world is not ready for a proper brainy adaptation of Snow Crash. All we deserve are these versions that can only asymptotically approach it.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.