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Richard Morgan + Netflix = ALTERED CARBON TV series


Werthead

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Also, I will say - this is the best looking show on Ultra 4k/HDR I've ever seen. The only thing that comes close is Chasing Coral. It is absolutely spectacular in color depth and intricacy. The cityscapes and fight sequences are incredible. 

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38 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Also, I will say - this is the best looking show on Ultra 4k/HDR I've ever seen. The only thing that comes close is Chasing Coral. It is absolutely spectacular in color depth and intricacy. The cityscapes and fight sequences are incredible. 

Have to agree with how good it looks in 4k while watching first 5 episodes on my brother's TV. It really is movie quality on the aesthetics and set design.

I'm enjoying it so far. It's a little slow but I think they are doing a very good job of showing how attitudes towards "sleeves" and pain and suffering are in a world where they are essentially disposable. That and the super rich now being immortal and even more separate from everyone else.

There are moments where Kovacs shines (telling the guy he doesn't care about anyone and post-torture behaviour) but a lot of the time he feels like he's floating through things. The tricky thing is, his whole schtick is to blend in/create a team of expendable allies around him so those quiet moments may also be intentional.

I'm not really feeling like "old" takeshi and "new" takeshi are the same person though. That's maybe my resistance to it, I'm not sure.

So far I'm not really sure what the deal is with the Envoys and Quellists (I can't remember from the book either). The envoys appear to be bad bogeymen while I used to think of them as super marines essentially working for the system. Not entirely sure why Takeshi is the last of them either. If they are so dangerous they were all exterminated then why was he the exception? I guess this'll be explained in the remaining episodes?

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14 minutes ago, red snow said:

So far I'm not really sure what the deal is with the Envoys and Quellists (I can't remember from the book either). The envoys appear to be bad bogeymen while I used to think of them as super marines essentially working for the system. Not entirely sure why Takeshi is the last of them either. If they are so dangerous they were all exterminated then why was he the exception? I guess this'll be explained in the remaining episodes?

I though the Envoys were the rebel fighters? What are the Quellists? I have not read the book, so some of this stuff has been difficult to piece together.

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I just finished episode 7 and so far, it was solid. The Kovacz past becomes more and more interesting, which then makes the entire murder plot a bit dullish. The Bancroft family dynamics is the ordinary "rich problems", even though I kinda expected it to be a bit more complicated. As for actors, I am not sure which one I like more as they hit the right places in different ways. But given that Will Yun Lee portrayed Takeshi in his original body, it makes it more natural (which, I suppose, was intention). Overall, it is interesting, but it fails to keep the murder plot as focus of the story. 

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1 hour ago, Corvinus said:

I though the Envoys were the rebel fighters? What are the Quellists? I have not read the book, so some of this stuff has been difficult to piece together.

I think they just combined the two on the show for simplicity's sake.

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1 hour ago, red snow said:

So far I'm not really sure what the deal is with the Envoys and Quellists (I can't remember from the book either). The envoys appear to be bad bogeymen while I used to think of them as super marines essentially working for the system. Not entirely sure why Takeshi is the last of them either. If they are so dangerous they were all exterminated then why was he the exception? I guess this'll be explained in the remaining episodes?

They changed it from the book. In the book, they were pretty much super machines, elite soldiers that were trained to move from sleeve to sleeve on different worlds and stop uprising. Or something like that. In the show, they basically made them resistance fighters, trained to fight the Protectorate by Quell and from her words, the religion bloomed. Episode 7 brings a lot of clarity to the show version of the Envoy's and what happened.

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Envoys were not the rebel fighters. They were simply exceptionally trained sociopaths, similar to Jaegar and the others on the show. Some envoys were on the government side, others not. 

Quellists were the people rebelling with Quellcrist Falconer. In the book she is emphatically NOT the trainer of the Envoys or the creator of them. And IIRC, Takeshi wasn't part of her gig either.

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1 minute ago, Kalbear said:

Envoys were not the rebel fighters. They were simply exceptionally trained sociopaths, similar to Jaegar and the others on the show. Some envoys were on the government side, others not. 

Quellists were the people rebelling with Quellcrist Falconer. In the book she is emphatically NOT the trainer of the Envoys or the creator of them. And IIRC, Takeshi wasn't part of her gig either.

He wasn't. They basically made Falconer and Virgina Vidaura the same person.

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Just now, Corvinus said:

I see. So when it comes to the show, the Envoys were the rebel fighters. Because when it comes to Jaegar and his people, those guys are referred to as Praetorians, and part of some military corpse, CTAC, or whatever.

Yup. Quell was their leader and over time, her words developed into the religion.

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11 minutes ago, Corvinus said:

I see. So when it comes to the show, the Envoys were the rebel fighters. Because when it comes to Jaegar and his people, those guys are referred to as Praetorians, and part of some military corpse, CTAC, or whatever.

They've taken some other liberties with the source material as well.  For example, Reileen is Takeshi's sister on the show for whatever reason.  

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I'm not quite as enthused about a second season going forward. Presumably they will keep Kinnaman around as Kovacs, which undercuts the whole expendability and replacement notion of sleeves going forward in the following books. You lose much of the universe's versimilitude if you keep Kinnaman around. He was good enough, but not good enough that I'd care if we got different actors for Kovacs each season. Honestly, the asian actor in this series played a better Kovacs.

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4 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Also, I will say - this is the best looking show on Ultra 4k/HDR I've ever seen. The only thing that comes close is Chasing Coral. It is absolutely spectacular in color depth and intricacy. The cityscapes and fight sequences are

Hmm. I was just thinking about watching this on my phone until I replace my laptop. 

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1 hour ago, Bran the Voyeur said:

I'm not quite as enthused about a second season going forward. Presumably they will keep Kinnaman around as Kovacs, which undercuts the whole expendability and replacement notion of sleeves going forward in the following books. You lose much of the universe's versimilitude if you keep Kinnaman around. He was good enough, but not good enough that I'd care if we got different actors for Kovacs each season. Honestly, the asian actor in this series played a better Kovacs.

Per Kinnaman, this is not the case, and he expects the show to be more of an anthology of sorts.

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49 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Per Kinnaman, this is not the case, and he expects the show to be more of an anthology of sorts.

That's certainly the way I'd do it if I were making the show.  We've already established in season one that Kovacs as a character is not restricted to any one actor, so why not carry that into season two?  Provided the show gets renewed, of course.

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6 hours ago, Kalbear said:

This has to be up there with the largest amount of boobs in any show in history. Just...so many boobs. I guess the casting department did good, because the boobs were diverse and multi-ethnic. 

It's up there with Westworld, both from the actresses with named parts and the extras/one-off minor characters. I think literally every named female character with more than a handful of lines does a full frontal nude scene except for two of them (Ortega's mom and the attorney lady). 

I wonder if we'll ever get a SF series that just straight up has toplessness as the norm for men and women in that society, thus giving them a reason for the characters to be perpetually topless (maybe if they ever do a R-rated remake TV series for John Carter of Mars . . . ). It's not like that's never happened in history before. 

1 hour ago, Bran the Voyeur said:

Presumably they will keep Kinnaman around as Kovacs, which undercuts the whole expendability and replacement notion of sleeves going forward in the following books. You lose much of the universe's versimilitude if you keep Kinnaman around.

I don't think they're keeping him. It's supposed to be an anthology series, and given Kovac's sleeve-jumping it means they can cast whoever they want in the lead role for him (including women as well as men theoretically). 

I'd heard that the series was really expensive for Netflix, but Wert did a blog post where it supposedly was only about $7 million/episode. That's still expensive, but it's less than what Netflix paid for Marco Polo per episode, and way less than what they're paying per episode for The Crown

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3 minutes ago, briantw said:

That's certainly the way I'd do it if I were making the show.  We've already established in season one that Kovacs as a character is not restricted to any one actor, so why not carry that into season two?  Provided the show gets renewed, of course.

Apparently it's already been amberlit for s2. 

I think one of the most disappointing things for me on this is the ending. 

Spoiler

In particular, Ortega. I did not buy that Ortega would just be okay after what she went through, or if she'd even care that much about Kovacs. I especially despised that she didn't hate Kovacs for all that she lost. She lost her entire extended family, RDed, her partner, and her major concern is about this asshole Kovacs? I wish they had made it so she was terrified that she'd never be able to look at Ryker again, knowing how much anger and blame she lays on him as Kovacs. 

But no, it's all 'thanks for the fuck, peace'. 

 

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52 minutes ago, Fall Bass said:

It's up there with Westworld, both from the actresses with named parts and the extras/one-off minor characters. I think literally every named female character with more than a handful of lines does a full frontal nude scene except for two of them (Ortega's mom and the attorney lady). 

To be honest, I think that Westworld comparison is truly to the point, even narrative-wise. If the whole idea is that body is an empty shell then it kinda makes sense to treat it that way (much like the robots were nude in Westworld). In the world so obsessed with the physique, one can argue that this approach can be seen as some sort of criticism/antithesis of the world we live in.

I finished it. It was enjoyable, had its problems and I wouldn't call the story the most coherent one. The ending was not as satisfactory as one would hope it, but the show overall leaves pleasant taste in the mouth. I liked it. Much more than I originally thought I would.

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The other problem I have is that Altered Carbon was never that good at exploring the actual effects of something like copying stacks and what that really means to a world. Pretty much all the things that AC does, Black Mirror has done a lot better and with more interesting side effects. 

What ends up happening is a pretty standard Buffy ninja fight sequence instead. And that's cool, and the added nudity is nice and all, but it's not particularly engaging to me on many levels. 

Also, in both the book and show:

Spoiler

It is really, really weird that the Bancrofts could be in any way in trouble because of, ya know, laws. That even a major scandal would bring them down. These are people who routinely multi-sleeve, who do a whole lot of random crime because they can, who imported a fucking SONGSPIRE TREE to their house and show it off. The idea that something so banal as killing a prostitute would bring them down in any way - or they wouldn't legalese sleaze their way out of it - is galling given how much power they showed. 

Heck, in the show it's much worse, as Kovacs is literally the most demonized human in the system, and they have the power to get him out of storage and have him run amok. 

 

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