GRcade

Based on the 2002 sci-fi novel of the same name by British author Richard K. Morgan, "Altered Carbon" tells the story of a gangster turned super soldier named Takeshi Kovacs. Brought back to life 250 years after he dies, Kovacs is tasked by Laurens Bancroft, a mysterious and powerful millionaire, to solve Bancroft's own murder.

The world (set 300 years into the future) is one in which people with enough money can download and pass their consciousness from body to body, which are known as "sleeves."

With a soul or personality that can be digitized and indefinitely transferred from one sleeve to another, individuals with enough cash to burn can, in theory, live forever.

Supposedly it’s cost $7 million dollars an episode Very interested in the aesthetic, high hopes for this one.

This sounds cool but I hope they go a proper interesting sci-fi route and not Westworld's baby's first philosophy angle. Joel Kinnaman I can give or take, but hopefully this will be good enough to bring me round on him.

smurphy wrote:This sounds cool but I hope they go a proper interesting sci-fi route and not Westworld's baby's first philosophy angle. Joel Kinnaman I can give or take, but hopefully this will be good enough to bring me round on him.

It's basically just a typical noir story with some hard scifi concepts thrown in.

Wondering how true this will be to the book or will they completely rewrite whole arcs ala The Expanse. Of course, in that the latter case I actually think what they did to the Expanse was an improvement as the books were not particularly well written even through the concept and world was great.

And here we go. Looking forward to giving this a watch later

I will definitely be checking this out, always up for some cyberpunk/deep-future scifi.

Just watched the first episode. Definitely seems promising. They did a great job of delivering a lot of expo and setting up the story in just one episode. I've seen plenty of shows that take half the season doing that.

Eesh, didn’t like that first episode much. A load of gibberish and a gooseberry fool soundtrack. Let’s see where this goes...

Trailer was amazing, will have to check this out.

Meep wrote:Just watched the first episode. Definitely seems promising. They did a great job of delivering a lot of expo and setting up the story in just one episode. I've seen plenty of shows that take half the season doing that.

The worst example of this was Stargate Universe. The entire first season could have been handled within about 3 episodes. The show went on to be not bad but that first season had all the pace of a drunk sloth.

Episode 2... I don't think I am particularly warming to the protagonist in this. He seems kind of disinterested in everything, which I suppose is in the tradition of noir and what you might expect given his position, however it does not help this show any.

Watched about 5 minutes of this in Dolbyvision last night and while it might be tosh, it's damn pretty looking tosh.

I’m enjoying this - it’s aesthetically amazing.

Watched two episodes and it's really bloody boring. However it looks stunning in 4k hdr so I'm watching the whole thing just for that

Having read the books, they've completely strawberry floated up the tone of this. The book is far more cynical about the state of the world and every action questions the state humans exist in, questioning whether the person that comes out of the stack is the same person who was put in there. This is just 'look at these pretty graphics and marvel at our clever ideas.'

It's strawberry floating boring too. The fights are terribly choreographed and, even on it's insane budget, the direction is so poor that everything looks cheap. There's a Sy-Fy channel sheen over the whole affair.

Finally, the sexualisation of women is absurd. Every female character has at least one scene in her underwear, even the hard bitten police detective, and there are multiple nude scenes with absolutely no point to them but to titillate.

Hard pass.

Tafdolphin wrote:Having read the books, they've completely strawberry floated up the tone of this. The book is far more cynical about the state of the world and every action questions the state humans exist in, questioning whether the person that comes out of the stack is the same person who was put in there. This is just 'look at these pretty graphics and marvel at our clever ideas.'

Dang. That's what I was afraid of. Probably give this a miss then.

Tafdolphin wrote:Every female character has at least one scene in her underwear and there are multiple nude scenes with absolutely no point to them but to titillate.

Actually I'm sure a few episodes wouldn't hurt.

Even in the future there are book splits

smurphy wrote:

Tafdolphin wrote:Having read the books, they've completely strawberry floated up the tone of this. The book is far more cynical about the state of the world and every action questions the state humans exist in, questioning whether the person that comes out of the stack is the same person who was put in there. This is just 'look at these pretty graphics and marvel at our clever ideas.'

Dang. That's what I was afraid of. Probably give this a miss then.

Tafdolphin wrote:Every female character has at least one scene in her underwear and there are multiple nude scenes with absolutely no point to them but to titillate.

Actually I'm sure a few episodes wouldn't hurt.

To be fair that aspect of the show was the one thing I didn’t enjoy, at all. It just comes off as a bit sleazy, where I think they were going for hedonistic. It kinda makes a bit more sense as the episodes go on but still. A bit gratuitous for my tastes.

Tafdolphin wrote:Having read the books, they've completely strawberry floated up the tone of this. The book is far more cynical about the state of the world and every action questions the state humans exist in, questioning whether the person that comes out of the stack is the same person who was put in there. This is just 'look at these pretty graphics and marvel at our clever ideas.'

I finished the series, and I hated parts and really enjoyed other bits, but this was the one thing I really didn't get, it seemed such a major thing about a copy just taking over, and they never really address it.

Zartan wrote:

Tafdolphin wrote:Having read the books, they've completely strawberry floated up the tone of this. The book is far more cynical about the state of the world and every action questions the state humans exist in, questioning whether the person that comes out of the stack is the same person who was put in there. This is just 'look at these pretty graphics and marvel at our clever ideas.'

I finished the series, and I hated parts and really enjoyed other bits, but this was the one thing I really didn't get, it seemed such a major thing about a copy just taking over, and they never really address it.

What really got me was the first few episode's treatment of the world itself. It shows this hugely marginalised populace and these filthy rich oligarchical meths and...does nothing with them. There's no bite to it, no idea suggestion that this is wrong, somehow. There was a great review I saw on twitter that refuted that this was cyperpunk as there was simply no punk spirit at all. It was just...cyber.

(As an aside, I don't view the books as cyberpunk either but that aesthetic was clearly what the series was going for)