Altered Carbon (Netflix)

[Nick B]

The smoking was in the book not added. Kovacs was pretty unhappy in the book that the sleeve had a bad nicotine addiction.

 

[duckEwe]

now that you both mention that, Takeshi did say in ep 1 or 2, that the sleeve had a nicotine addiction.

 

[Nick B]

Here are my (few) gripes about the TV adaptation.
The biggest, and main one. Envoys were protectorate special forces, not a rebellion group. Kovacs turned rebel later. There is no reason for this backstop change, and it makes little sense. You see the (incredibly expensively trained and modified) Envoys training in the wilderness. This makes no sense.

2- The huge amount of totally gratuitous full frontal nudity. One of my pet hates, as it always seems a cheap sh*t to attract teenagers to watch shows (like got). Countless amounts of breasts and lady bits on show. One male bit once. Hardly balance for equality. As usual for tv/film. And completely unnecessary IMHO. No problem with full frontal nudity if it is a story part, but it almost never is.

3. Quellchrist Falconer was not an Envoy, she was a rebel leader, hugely important in her own right, and it demean that importance by making her a suoersoldier. She was a hero for her intellect and wisdom, not battle prowess.

That's it. Other than those bits, I love the TV adaptation.

 

[ctg]

-

 

[The Bluestocking]

I believe the smoking is in the book, Takeshi didn’t smoke but the original owner of the sleeve did. Ortega even says she was always trying to get Ryder to quit.

Yup - and while Ortega and Kovacs were waiting at the posh cloning facility/vault for the uber-rich, Kovacs told Ortega that smoking isn't his vice but the vice of the sleeve he's in.

 

[WarriorMouse]

The huge amount of totally gratuitous full frontal nudity. One of my pet hates, as it always seems a cheap sh*t to attract teenagers to watch shows (like got). Countless amounts of breasts and lady bits on show. One male bit once. Hardly balance for equality. As usual for tv/film. And completely unnecessary IMHO. No problem with full frontal nudity if it is a story part, but it almost never is.

There was two instances of male bits on show by my count but still ...
Totally agree with comment.

 

[The Bluestocking]

The huge amount of totally gratuitous full frontal nudity. One of my pet hates, as it always seems a cheap sh*t to attract teenagers to watch shows (like got). Countless amounts of breasts and lady bits on show. One male bit once. Hardly balance for equality. As usual for tv/film. And completely unnecessary IMHO. No problem with full frontal nudity if it is a story part, but it almost never is.

Also, you could cut out all the sex scenes and it wouldn't make any difference to the story. Totally gratuitous.

But otherwise, this adaptation rocks!

 

[Vladd67]

The show runner on nudity.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/altered-carbons-showrunner-talks-the-shows-high-nudity-1822910712

 

[Dave]

That link asks:

What do y’all think?

I think that it is probably a bigger problem for US audiences than for European. US censors allow far more violence than European censors and for nudity the coin is reversed. I noticed that it had a larger than usual amount of "nipples and butts", but it didn't bother me, and if it was deliberately done to "illustrate the frivolousness of the future’s bodies" and that "the advent of this technology fundamentally and substantially changes people’s relationships with their idea of their own body" then I believe that it worked. Bodies were not depicted as people but simply as meat. I don't get aroused by meat.

 

[The Bluestocking]

I had no problem with the nudity but I still think that two out of the three sex scenes involving Kovacs were not needed whatsoever.

 

[Dave]

Yes, I do have that same criticism though. Where actual sexual relations were shown, then I think more could have been made of the emotional reasons and consequences. With Kovacs and Mrs. Bancroft, in the TV series it seemed unnecessary, but was more important in the book (I think.) With Kovacs and Ortega, he is actually in her former partner's sleeve and you have to ask what is happening in her head, but that went largely unanswered both times.

The nicotine addiction is something else that was better explained in the book.

I like the idea that the book and TV adaption are not the same thing. I wouldn't want them to be the same. However, each must stand up on its own merit. You shouldn't need to have read the book to understand the TV series. It is obvious from many comments, here and elsewhere, that the TV series failed on that level.

 

[ctg]

I had no problem with the nudity but I still think that two out of the three sex scenes involving Kovacs were not needed whatsoever.

In the books all those scenes with Miriam are important. In the televised series Miriam comes out a bit poorly, but a lot of interesting things were written on those, especially the involvement of powerful drugs. Without Miriam dripping in that info - literally - Kovacs would have had harder time understanding what really happened at Bancroft's house. Ultimately Miriam wanted her husband to fail so that she could take the role as true head of the Bancroft dynasty.

 

[Lumens]

Watched two episodes so far... Is the dialogue a bit weak? Not bad as such, just a bit tired. Maybe it's a genre thing, or it could just be me.

Otherwise it's not bad.

 

[ctg]

There are scenes of eye-watering violence in the novel and its sequels, Broken Angels and Woken Furies. “I’m not a fan of violence,” says Morgan, “but I love it in my entertainment. Everything I write is interrogating that paradox. A lot of my writing comes from rage. It’s all been vomited out on to the page. I’m incensed by how badly humans behave. I guess what it’s about is wasted potential. We could be so much better. We always trip up, always manage to f*ck it up. We seem to have a will to do that.”

Critics have been largely positive about the Netflixseries, but a lot of attention has been focused on a sequence that – in the book – sees Kovacs sleeved in the body of a young woman, who is brutally tortured. “The point is, he’s lost all the hardwiring of a combat body. Most of the detail was drawn from Amnesty International reports I’d been reading about the torture of female dissidents in Iran and Colombia. I was filled with this fury.”

On screen, though, no gender switch is made. It is the actor Joel Kinnaman, playing Kovacs, whom we see tortured. Kalogridis made the change, says Morgan, feeling that torturing a woman would “come across as exploitative, a sick thrill for misogynists”. He’s fine about the change – “it’s still pretty horrible” – and acknowledges that the scene in the book has “been called out as being super-sexist and exploitative”. It never seemed that way to him, though. “To me, it was a kind of allegiance – that Kovacs is going to suffer what women in this situation suffer. And then, of course, he comes back later and slaughters everybody in sight.”

I tell him that this rage appears at odds with his genial demeanour. “You say I look like a nice guy,” he says. “I think I mostly am. It’s tamped down.” He then points to a scene in the adaptation in which a woman puts a convicted rapist – or rather, his consciousness – into a snake’s body. It sends the man insane.

“Netflix put out an ad asking if you would do this to your worst enemy. I’m like: ‘Yeah, probably.’ There’s no limit to my capacity for vindictive violence, I think, if some of these switches are tripped. I look at what goes on in places like Iran, especially against women. Violence against women always makes me angry – and when I say angry, I mean red-mist angry.

“I would cheerfully butcher every revolutionary guard in Tehran if I could wear enough body armour to get through it and survive. So that’s where the fury came from. And you get it out on the page. But you have to temper it with the fact that, if you just write fantasies of violence, it won’t work. It’s got to feel realistic. There has to be a cost.”

Altered Carbon author Richard Morgan: 'There’s no limit to my capacity for violence'

Morgan is a consultant on the show which, if all goes well, will run for five seasons. He has said in the past that he is done with Kovacs, but the adaptation has “kind of woken it all up again”, so he might reconsider. For now, though, he is finishing a new sci-fi novel set on Mars. “It’s a response to this ludicrous, wide-eyed enthusiasm for colonising Mars that is kicking around, especially in America.” It stars “a disenchanted protagonist who is violent at the drop of a hat and doesn’t really like anybody or anything. So it’s not dissimilar in tone”.

 

[ctg]

Although Altered Carbon season 2 was never part of the plan for showrunner Laeta Kalogridis or Netflix, there are all kinds of reasons why the cyberpunk hit, which was a winner with most viewers and many critics including us, might be renewed. Although the next Richard K. Morgan book in the series might be of too large a scale to be adapted the way the first Takeshi Kovacs novel was, there are plenty of other planets in the settled worlds for the series to explore if Netflix decides to give it another run.

Joel Kinnaman, who played the lead character in Altered Carbon, has already signed on for another streaming series on Amazon called Hanna, but the beauty of the concept behind the show, in which people's consciousnesses are downloaded into new bodies, is that Takeshi Kovacs could be re-cast without upsetting the internal logic of the story. Other supposedly dead characters could similarly be resurrected in new 'sleeves.'

Kalogridis confirmed to EW in a recent interview that if Altered Carbon were to be renewed, everything could change. "We want to do something surprising with the second season that is not in the same place with the same people," she says. "I think the universe of these books gives you more latitude... Richard [K. Morgan] and I have a plan, I don’t know how people will feel about the plan, but we do have one!"

Perhaps Altered Carbon season 2 would have Kovacs searching for his long lost love, Quellcrist Falconer, who viewers learn might have a surviving cortical stack out there waiting to be re-sleeved. "The stuff we created in the first season that conflated some elements from the third book — like bring Quell (Renee Elise Goldsberry) into the story earlier — that also altered the structure significantly," admits Kalogridis. "So now you have this character who wasn’t in the second book and I hope if we’ve done our job people will be very invested in this love story."

Altered Carbon showrunner talks season 2 possibilities

Harlan's world is almost confirmed to be in the next one.

 

[Lucien21]

The new book is called "Thin Air"

Good reads has it as set in the Black Man universe (Thirteen for US readers) Thin Air by Richard K. Morgan

 

[Cli-Fi]

I just finished episode 4. I'm hooked.

 

[Jeffbert]

episode 7: in the middle of this episode there is a scene that somehow seems familiar:

Spoiler

There is a group of people/fighters in the middle of an outcropping of rocks. A woman is the leader, & she challenges two subordinates to try to kill her. I cannot recall where or when, but this really seems familiar!

 

[Jeffbert]

I just finished the season, & now wonder if there will be a second season, as this adventure has closure / cloture?

The show runner on nudity.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/altered-carbons-showrunner-talks-the-shows-high-nudity-1822910712

I think the argument for the nudity, especially the FFN, is weak because not only do the characters see those views, but the viewers also see the same views. In other shows, the nudity is discrete, though it is obvious, the viewer is not seeing the same things as the characters see. In other words, do any but the characters need to see the other characters' naughty parts?

 

[ctg]

In other words, do any but the characters need to see the other characters' naughty parts?

Yes. The sex scenes with Miriam in the book 1 was crucial. Netflix really didn't show much. In fact they showed nothing at all, while in the book those two scenes are 'so steamy'