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Speaking of sleeves, I think they really hosed up the synth sleeves. In the books they’re weird and offputting to other people and being in them is a lovely experience. In the show they’re shapeshifting superbodies.
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Apr 29, 2020 22:23
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Carnage, the guy who ran the underground cage-fighting venue, nailed that aspect IMO. He made synths seem like disturbing, clown-faced puppets made of melted latex, and I could easily see why nobody would want to be that. But yeah, the shape-shifting sex robot seemed superhuman. It didn’t seem like nearly the gross nightmare you’re describing from the books.
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Apr 30, 2020 00:05
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You guys are reminding me of how much I enjoyed season 1. Think it’s time for a rewatch at some point, but I just started The Leftovers :popcorn:
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Apr 30, 2020 00:17
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Speaking of sleeves, I think they really hosed up the synth sleeves. In the books they’re weird and offputting to other people and being in them is a lovely experience. In the show they’re shapeshifting superbodies. But that would mean the audience would be confused as to who Trepp is later!!  Jack2142 posted:I think Season One was interesting as it changed some things up from the book I think for the better. Hard disagree. Haaaaaaard disagree. Adaptations change things, simply due to the nature of a different format and pacing, but Altered Carbon's were almost uniformly crap. All of it is mired in cliche or rooted in a desire to turn Kovacs from a fish-out-of-water audience perspective into Angel from Buffy because they aren't actually capable of decent writing. The difference in writing quality between the book scenes used verbatim and the original ones is generally pretty noticeable, and made all the worse by being a detective story so their changes just slam a bunch of gaping plotholes into a neat and tidy mystery plot that didn't need to exist. I mentioned earlier that Lizzy's actress was fine, but poorly-cast for plot reasons; Anyone remember what Bancroft's type is? The very very specific type he has with women that is a central aspect of the plot? You know you're in for a good time when the lead-off is "He was on ice... ~FOREVERRR!!!~", because that is some stupidly-childish writing trying to look impressive when "Look; You can either do this or go back on ice to wait out the rest of your 110-odd year sentence" says a lot more about the crime and punishment in general in the setting. Neddy Seagoon fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 02:59
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I'm bumping this thread to share the news that Altered Carbon has been cancelled: https://deadline-com.cdn.ampproject...s-1203023456%2F This sucks. Should I start from the beginning if I want to pick up the books?
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Aug 27, 2020 03:06
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eh, it's no big loss. Season 2 was awful. Start the books from the beginning, but expect to lose interest partway through the third. In my opinion you could just read the first one and call it there.
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Aug 27, 2020 03:54
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Vim Fuego posted:eh, it's no big loss. Season 2 was awful. The second one is completely different, but in a pretty cool and fun way. Book 3 could have been good but the emphasis was on the wrong story beats so it fell flat and yeah, shits out about a third of the way through.
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Aug 27, 2020 03:57
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Vim Fuego posted:eh, it's no big loss. Season 2 was awful. Yeah. I wouldn't say S1 was excellent but it was very enjoyable - I think they lost a lot by moving away from the detective noir style and into...whatever S2 was supposed to be. The show clearly suffered from it, and it can't be a cheap show to make. Still kinda sucks, I wish Netflix would take a little more time to develop their shows conceptually before producing/airing them, similar to how HBO works. They certainly have the capital for it.
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Aug 27, 2020 04:57
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Shooting Blanks posted:Yeah. I wouldn't say S1 was excellent but it was very enjoyable - I think they lost a lot by moving away from the detective noir style and into...whatever S2 was supposed to be. The show clearly suffered from it, and it can't be a cheap show to make. Still kinda sucks, I wish Netflix would take a little more time to develop their shows conceptually before producing/airing them, similar to how HBO works. They certainly have the capital for it. Yeah. If I had any hope we were getting another season 1 I'd be more bummed out. Season 1 has been fun to rewatch.
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Aug 27, 2020 05:03
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There Bias Two posted:I'm bumping this thread to share the news that Altered Carbon has been cancelled: They deviated so heavily from the books and also S2 was such a steep drop in quality and internal consistency I had no expectations for S3. Like they were just desperately hoping for a Expanse level fervor over the series and even after a pretty good S1 it just wasn't there.
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Aug 27, 2020 05:05
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Vim Fuego posted:Yeah. If I had any hope we were getting another season 1 I'd be more bummed out. Season 1 has been fun to rewatch. I still can’t believe how perfect the casting for S1 was, every single character from the books looked exactly like I pictured them back in the day. Kinnemon and Will Yun Lee also were really good at moving and talking the same way, which is something that I feel S2 didn’t pull off at all.
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Aug 27, 2020 05:06
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I feel like 2 stepped away from what made season 1 enjoyable to do some really lame "lost love" story that someone thought was compelling. The stuff will Quel was the least interesting stuff in season 1 and it being front and center in season 2 just brought the whole thing down. I feel like someone just loved the name Quelcrest Falconer and wanted her to be the focus of the show. Also season 2 was only like 1% as horny as season 1 and that was a mistake.
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Aug 27, 2020 08:46
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The gripping narrative of the series was the entire premise of immortality for the wealthy and the societal ramifications of "soul capsules" and what it means for the poor and disenfranchised. Then it heads out to Vancouver forest recording stage number eleventy seven for a bunch of gun fu fights interspersed with scary ancient alien poo poo "uh oh, we played with tools we don't understand and THEY'RE BACK!" with all the mysterious Quel savior stuff like she's the wizard messiah. Maybe someone who's read the books can elaborate how they did it differently and if it worked better.
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Aug 27, 2020 08:58
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pentyne posted:The gripping narrative of the series was the entire premise of immortality for the wealthy and the societal ramifications of "soul capsules" and what it means for the poor and disenfranchised. So the main action of Book 1 is almost exactly the same as Season 1. The show developed Poe into much more of a character (in the book the hotel, the Hendrix, is just a sentient hotel, its basically the ships computer in Star Trek, but there are fun hints that it's secretly really enjoying itself) and all the "superintelligent computers with ennui" stuff in S2 is brand new, and easily the best new materia. The problem is that the show completely changes all the background story and context for whats going on. B1/S1 is a cyberpunk murder mystery, so the story is mostly unaffected. It's when S2 starts to delve into that backstory that things fall apart. The big change is in both Envoys and Quellism. In the book, Envoys are the elite special ops division of the Protectorate - basically the secret-service equivalent of CTAC in the show. The kind of people where you can drop one randomly on a distant planet and they'll engineer regime change before lunchtime. Book-Quellism is a vaguely anarcho-communist ideology that fully embraces Stacks and immortality as a form of permanent revolution - they can massacre your forces, stomp you out completely, but if you can scatter yourself to the wind you can eventually rise again. One thing I really dig is that Quellism is explicitely not a fully-formed and coherent ideology - it accepts that the world is messy and that at certain points you've just gotta make a judgement in the moment. It feels a lot like Morgan's grappling with his own inability to come up with a perfectly consistent belief system (there's a great interview he did about violence in S1 - violence is awful and horrifying and by rights we should all be pacifists. But violence is also cool and sexy. And no matter how pacifist we might want to be, we know in our bones that some fuckers just need to die) This also means that Kovacs has absolutely nothing to do with the Quellists, never met them, never worked with them, never knew Quell. He just has a kind of quaint affection for her teachings. The show makes Quellists space-luddites. Immortality and stacks are bad because ???????. Something about how death gives life meaning I think? Or that immortal rulers are worse than mortal rulers? (because dynasties aren't a thing, apparantly) It's never really explored, its just lame and boring. One of the key ideas in the books is that even if we literally cure death there will still be inequality, the uber-rich will still run the show, nothing will change. Which is much bleaker than how the show portrays it. It really bums me out how they deliberately chose to ignore the actual ramifications of stacks. On the macro level you have the bizarre decision to just change the story to be about immortal-alien-ghost-assassins, but you also have the way that every single death in the show is somebody getting RDed. Because god forbid we have characters confront immortality in this show about immortality. It's not even like they couldn't write that stuff! S1 adds two really great plot points about resleeving (the married couple who fight to the death every weekend, and the cop downloading her grandmother into a neo-nazi) that absolutely nails the theme and tone that the books are going for. They're great scenes! The people who wrote them clearly get sci-fi. And then they decide to not do that and give us forest-ninjas. (also Book Reileen isn't Tak's sister, she's just some piece of poo poo meth-crime lord. It feels like the show made the change to show that being truely immortal will make you insane and evil, while the book suggests that Meth's become truely immortal because they're already insane and evil)
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Aug 27, 2020 12:07
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There’s another big difference between the book meths and the show meths that was a total wasted opportunity on the show. The book meths aren’t just old because they have the resources to keep sleeving- in the books, basically anyone can get a sleeve if they want one. It may be a lovely synth, or it may be mortgaged with all the horrifying repo that implies if you miss payments, but you can get one. The thing is, most people get tired of living after two or three go-rounds, and then they just get spun up for holidays and family events, and then do that less and less as they become more and more disconnected. The meths are people so convinced of their own importance they can’t accept a world without them in it and they just keep going. Yeah, they accumulate vast resources over their many lifetimes but that’s a result and not a cause. I think that’s a way more interesting thing than “they live forever ‘cause they’re rich”.
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Aug 27, 2020 13:07
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Ugly In The Morning posted:There’s another big difference between the book meths and the show meths that was a total wasted opportunity on the show. The book meths aren’t just old because they have the resources to keep sleeving- in the books, basically anyone can get a sleeve if they want one. It may be a lovely synth, or it may be mortgaged with all the horrifying repo that implies if you miss payments, but you can get one. The thing is, most people get tired of living after two or three go-rounds, and then they just get spun up for holidays and family events, and then do that less and less as they become more and more disconnected. The meths are people so convinced of their own importance they can’t accept a world without them in it and they just keep going. Yeah, they accumulate vast resources over their many lifetimes but that’s a result and not a cause. I think that’s a way more interesting thing than “they live forever ‘cause they’re rich”. So basically all the micromanaging control freaks who would otherwise be stopped by their eventual death, aren't.
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Aug 27, 2020 13:31
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There Bias Two posted:So basically all the micromanaging control freaks who would otherwise be stopped by their eventual death, aren't. Yeah. They’re basically the whatever-high-percentage of CEOs and mega rich that are clinically sociopaths/narcissists. I think that approach/most people saying “gently caress it” after a while is a way more interesting and insightful approach for the psychological effects of immortality than “nah, it’s all about if you can afford it or not, we should cap the human lifespan at 100 years”
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Aug 27, 2020 13:35
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Point is that after a couple of synths you should be able to afford something better. If you cared to. Apparently a lot of people don't, but a lot of people also do. Pretty good overview. It really seemed like whoever are in charge over productions in Netflix just completely lost interest after the first season. S2 is such a different show that I don't understand how it even got greenlit. It's frustrating how sometimes Netflix just squanders IP's with good potential and then just chucks them away. 
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Aug 27, 2020 13:39
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itry posted:Pretty good overview. I don’t think they lost interest, I think the show runner thought they had a bunch of ideas on how to improve on the concept, but it just happens that those ideas were dumb, bad, and incredibly cliched. It felt like they were trying to swerve into the kind of territory usually covered by YA stuff in S2, down to even cutting out most of the nudity/grimmer material and adding way more clear cut opposing outside forces (the goddamn aliens)
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Aug 27, 2020 13:41
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I'm talking about the people above the production team. Unless they're always hands off/on and S1 was a fluke. Which is a possibility.
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Aug 27, 2020 13:42
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itry posted:I'm talking about the people above the production team. Unless they're always hands off/on and S1 was a fluke. Which is a possibility. Oh, whoops, I get what you’re saying now, I thought you meant at a showrunner level instead of writers/directors, I was like a rung or two low.
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Aug 27, 2020 13:43
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I'm not even sure if S2 had the same writers/showrunner. By appearances you'd think the entire production was different.
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Aug 27, 2020 13:48
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itry posted:I'm not even sure if S2 had the same writers/showrunner. By appearances you'd think the entire production was different. Looks like they did- I thought it was the same showrunner since the original was still in the credits but she stepped down to EP for season 2, which may explain some stuff. I’ll double check the writers, but the decision to leave the books behind in S2 is a huge reason for the worse quality there even before any potential staff changes- the new stuff in S1 was, with few exceptions, far weaker than the book stuff. Not having that crutch anymore definitely was responsible for a chunk of that.
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Aug 27, 2020 13:54
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Looks like they did- I thought it was the same showrunner since the original was still in the credits but she stepped down to EP for season 2, which may explain some stuff. I’ll double check the writers, but the decision to leave the books behind in S2 is a huge reason for the worse quality there even before any potential staff changes- the new stuff in S1 was, with few exceptions, far weaker than the book stuff. Not having that crutch anymore definitely was responsible for a chunk of that. For sure. It wouldn't be much of a problem if they were willing to use the same themes as the books, the same writing style. Like a good ghostwriter. Instead we got... 
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Aug 27, 2020 13:58
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Oh and another (tiny) change that really gets my goat: In the book, Bancroft gives Kovacs his space-mastercard to appropriately arm himself. He goes to this really swanky custom gun shop, all polished wood panels with a synth in a swanky suit. And he buys a large quantity of terrifyingly messy and brutal weaponry, all perfectly legal and above board. In the show, it's some skeezy blackmarket dude. One tells us exactly how the priorities and laws in this world are set up as a result of its sci-fi conceits. The other tells us "this is a cyberpunk show"
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Aug 27, 2020 15:07
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As I said, it really feels like someone had a huge hard on for Quell and wanted her to be central to everything. But yea, season 2 basically removed any idea about stacks and what death means in this world by having everyone be sniping stacks constantly.
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Aug 27, 2020 19:35
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Apparently they replaced the showrunner for season 2 with a boomer who worked on The Flash and a bunch of failed ABC shows God I wish I could get such an easy sinecure
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Aug 27, 2020 20:56
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twistedmentat posted:As I said, it really feels like someone had a huge hard on for Quell and wanted her to be central to everything. That had been there since S1 e...7ish but hooboy did it take over bad in S2. I feel like the writers really liked their versions of Quell,Poe, and Reileen and couldn’t give a poo poo about plot or setting.
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Aug 27, 2020 20:57
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Ugly In The Morning posted:That had been there since S1 e...7ish but hooboy did it take over bad in S2. I feel like the writers really liked their versions of Quell,Poe, and Reileen and couldn’t give a poo poo about plot or setting. I could understand having the Envoys be some rebels that wanted to stop the Stacks, and Quell was their leader, but then they just had to make her and Tak be lovers and he could never let go of that and decided to make that the new center of the show. And yea, they wanted the stories to exist to have their OCs do stuff without any care about what that actually meant for the story. How to squander an excellent sci-fi setting to have the most boring and cliche love stories.
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Aug 28, 2020 07:04
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The initial internet complaints storm about "white-washing" by having Kinnamen play Kovacs was more memorable then anything in S2 by a lot. S2 was pretty lackluster in so many ways, I don't remember much, especially since S1 had so many iconic moments like the whole cyber-torture thing with Kovacs taking control over the simulation. But seriously, wtf was with the Anthony Mackie casting? Putting scenes with Kinnaman, Yun Lee, and Mackie against each other it's like Mackie read the script for 5 mins and just decided to act the exact same way as his default method. I'm not saying Kinnamen would've made sense in S2 (because it couldn't? space travel taking tons of time bodies don't travel their stacks do right?) but someone putting in a bit more effort would gone a long ways to improve the season, especially when paired up against Yun Lee as the 'original'. pentyne fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 07:17
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S2 is some unholy mashing of a few key plots from the third book jammed into a reduced scope version of the second book. Come the third book Quellcrist and Takeshi were revealed an item some 200+ years ago, though she's some weird mysterious memory fragment, and I can't recall her body/stack having survived any dramatic sequence of events. I'm also not convinced their relationship was even mentioned in the first two books. Or even sure that relationship made sense in either case. Anyway, I think the books are decades to even centuries apart. So, yes, time dilation for reasons of travel or even prison sentences is a big element to all the body swapping. You get beamed/cast here to there to avoid a few lifetimes in stasis for travel or maybe you lose your body because of a 100+ year prison sentence. The ability to alter the perception of time gets a lot of play. Because they threw the world building out the window in the second season of the show I'm not convinced it made enough sense if you hadn't read the books or were into cyberpunk enough to infer the gaps. If I could get my books back from my buddy I'd re-read them to cleanse my palate of the show.
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Aug 28, 2020 10:39
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pentyne posted:The initial internet complaints storm about "white-washing" by having Kinnamen play Kovacs was more memorable then anything in S2 by a lot. S2 was pretty lackluster in so many ways, I don't remember much, especially since S1 had so many iconic moments like the whole cyber-torture thing with Kovacs taking control over the simulation. An example of a pretty good change/addition. It doesn't play that way in the books, but it works in the show (S1 at least). pentyne posted:But seriously, wtf was with the Anthony Mackie casting? Putting scenes with Kinnaman, Yun Lee, and Mackie against each other it's like Mackie read the script for 5 mins and just decided to act the exact same way as his default method. It's because Mackie is a bad actor. And yeah, space travel still takes years/decaded, so people either freeze themselves or needlecast.
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Aug 28, 2020 14:04
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pentyne posted:The initial internet complaints storm about "white-washing" by having Kinnamen play Kovacs was more memorable then anything in S2 by a lot. S2 was pretty lackluster in so many ways, I don't remember much, especially since S1 had so many iconic moments like the whole cyber-torture thing with Kovacs taking control over the simulation. IDK man Will Yun Lee is inarguably the best actor of the 3 Kovacs we've had so far  Double-sleeving Kovacs twice is lame but an excuse to bring Will Yun Lee into the current timeline is actually acceptable for me. I wouldn't mind how contrived it'd be if next season they're like "oh hey we recreated your original body" just so we can have more of Lee playing Kovacs. He loving rules. itry posted:It's because Mackie is a bad actor.
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Aug 28, 2020 17:43
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This show had such a potential, but somehow it pissed it all away. Especially during the season 2, which was more or less "space indiana jones story" which basically forgot everything that made it cool or unique as a scifi-cyberpunk setting. They killed the only Met in the first episode of season 2 and after that they kept permakilling every character. After that, it was really just a season-long middling episode of Black Mirror.
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Aug 28, 2020 18:57
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The first half of season 1 was good but then the show became really claustrophobic IMO. The entire setting was basically a couple of streets in a single city and that drat forest, and the story orbited Kovacs so tightly that pretty much every single character was entirely defined by their relation to him. I did find it really funny when the logical progression of this Kovacs obsessed world was to introduce a second copy of him.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:41
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Yeah the show was at its best when it was Kovacs investigating Bancroft's murder. Once that was done it was all downhill. The Quelchrist/Rei stuff is just awful.
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Aug 28, 2020 20:05
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Zaphod42 posted:Yeah the show was at its best when it was Kovacs investigating Bancroft's murder. Once that was done it was all downhill. The Quelchrist/Rei stuff is just awful. Yeah it was great near the begging when it was pretty much the classic neo-noir story. The unreliable employer that witholds key information, the femme fatale and the hero being hoodwinked during the course of the investigation.
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Aug 29, 2020 02:10
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Andrigaar posted:Come the third book Quellcrist and Takeshi were revealed an item some 200+ years ago, though she's some weird mysterious memory fragment, and I can't recall her body/stack having survived any dramatic sequence of events. I'm also not convinced their relationship was even mentioned in the first two books. Or even sure that relationship made sense in either case. It sucks we won't get a season three because I did like a lot of the ideas it tossed around like the reclamation teams and wireheads and all that good stuff, but after how season 1 botched the meths I don't think they would have accurately brought across how terrible Harlen's World was meant to be.
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Aug 29, 2020 19:05
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Pierson posted:Takeshi had run with a group of Quellists before (after? I can't remember which) becoming an Envoy and had a ton of sympathy for the cause but he and Quell never lived in the same timeframe let alone were an item. See this is SO much better. Whoever is writing the TV show has the skill of a teenager and turned Kovacs into THE SPECIAL and ugh.
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Aug 29, 2020 19:56
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Zaphod42 posted:See this is SO much better. Whoever is writing the TV show has the skill of a teenager and turned Kovacs into THE SPECIAL and ugh. It also helps that the Quellists actually had targets, their methods actually leveraged the setting well, and they were primarily background. Making Quell the person who invented stacks (using alien tech, naturally), Kovacs’ lover, and fighting to end the way that stacks actually made the setting unique was one of the dumbest changes I’ve ever seen made for an adaptation. The writers had so much contempt for the main concept of what they were adapting, it’s ridiculous. Between the Quell stuff and RDing loving everyone, why did they even bother licensing the setting?
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Aug 29, 2020 19:59
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