So, the major divergences from the book are because of the ending. This is one case the book nerds are right to complain IMO. I understand things from paper don’t translate well into film, but this seems like a clumsy job. I have been trying to imagine what they were trying to do but I fail.
Ending SPOILERS:
In the book, Reileen Kawahara is not Tak’s sister. She’s a former associate. She rose through the ranks of the yakuza by being incredibly ruthless and insensitive to other’s lives. Much of what they tell us in the TV show is unchanged - yakuza, hobnobs with powerful people, recommended Tak to Bannon (sp?)
There was no love story angle either. Kovacs and Ortega do hook up but it was just a thing.Riker was dirty and everyone knew it. This was not disputed by Ortega.
They simplified and made the good guys very good. They (clumsily) added a love story, perhaps to humanize the supersoldier force of nature Kovacs is.
My theory is they wanted to introduce Reileen earlier because in a TV murder mystery you can’t have the guilty party just appear at the 11th hour out of nowhere. So they hacked and made her Tak’s sister. Then they had ideas and added all the jealousy and everything went downhill from there.
I thought this was thoroughly enjoyable, but it left me feeling that it only got 65% of achieved potential. I also think it was a more solid and well rounded experience than the book, which I was surprised by. And I went back and reread the books, to make sure.
Pros:
Moving Quell in the books up and making the Envoys a revolutionary force, not a force that supported the powers that be, seemed like a huge improvement. Also the twist that she was the inventor of the doodad that made sleeving popular was a nice twist, and the mission to stop it.
Perceived problems:
Half the street scenes seemed like that just reused the same set. That mid-street tunnel tube thing.
The only reason that Lawrens killed the hooker, was because his wife via Reileen doped him up with a drug that would ensure it. It seemed contrived to not factor that in the whole Agatha Christie expose at the end.
The whole premise from Quell that they could download a life limiting thing into all doodads at once,
made no sense I could tell. Why couldn’t it be reversed? What if someone was out of “backup range”
at the time - which was a thing I assume, and would relate to who could be automatically updated. This seemed the weakest plot point for me.
This sleeve shit is lame. It suffers the same problem that destroy and recreate teleportation suffers.
You have no conscious link to the recreated version of you, besides the shared memories. No wonder double sleeving is illegal, as it highlights the resleeved version is not you.
I was left wanting a William Gibson-based cyberpunk series, based on the Neuromancer world. Even better would be a series that aggregated the best most well done parts of Gibson, Stephenson and Morgan’s setting. What Total Recall 2070 showed me, was that you could take source material and make something based on it that was pretty good.
I am really enjoying this for some reason. Poe, the hotel guy, is fantastic. I love every scene he’s in. Not particularly enthused about the casting of the two leads – the female hispanic detective, and eminem-minus from The Killing. But it’s not a deal breaker.
But the story and the special effects are top notch IMO, and the just-for-kicks visual style reminds me of the original Total Recall.
Maybe I’ll hate it by the end, I dunno, I’m only on episode 3. But so far big thumbs up 👍
Watched two episodes last night. So far I’m digging the world. The production is quite impressive as well. We’ll see where this goes, but I give it good marks so far.
It’s an interesting and neat world. Needed more cybered up basasses though. Also military body armor apparently does nothing, so I’m not sure why anyone uses it other than to look creepy. It’s the Stormtrooper issue. The armor doesn’t stop blasters at all. Or arrows. Or rocks. Or punches. But at least its hard to look out of the helmet? At least this armor probably has all sorts of cool targeting/sensor gear in the helmet, which everyone takes off so you know who they are for any important fight.
Not gratuitous to me. I do wonder whether we are seeing the actor/actress, or whether we are getting the Cerce/Game of Thrones style walk of shame body double past over. Having the clones dressed would seem somewhat fake.
I also have no interest in seeing Purefoy’s junk, or any other dude’s, but seeing it helps balance out the use of nudity.
Thumbs up from me. Future sci-fi should follow the path of GoT, Westworld and Altered Carbon.
Watched episodes 2 and 3. I like it, but they are making some changes from the book that seem strange. Not that making changes in an adaption is wrong, but so far it is hard for me too see the purpose of making them.
I usually gauge the gratuitousness of the nudity and sex as whether or not it is necessary to advance the story, and the answer as it is in most cases is a definite no. So from that perspective, it is almost all very gratuitous. Don’t try to kid yourself there.
But @Oghier is correct, it is a feature of the series if the graphic novel is even more graphic. Though I think the story, production and acting would survive without it, the interested crowd want the gratuitous sex and nudity.
HBO based shows actually have an obvious formula for gratuitous sex and violence, even the popular higher budget ones, as did R films in the 70’s/80’s. Netflix material appears to definitely be moving in the gratuitous direction. In the set of all those wanting to see the show the subset of those watching it mainly for the nekkedness is probably the largest.
Interesting paradox that the show makes plenty of negative commentary on a society that devolves into a focus of mainly fulfilling sexual thoughts/desires.
Interesting, is it not, that there is so much talk about the “gratuitous” sex and nudity but no one bats an eye at the extreme levels of violence. That says a lot about what’s acceptable in our current society. Are we fucking mental?
I like a good idea for a space ship would be a large tree floating in space, with a forcefield bubble around it.
I wonder what the tree thing in this serie is?, and what is the link of the technology that allow “soul” body transfer and alien technology?.
What happens if we get a survivor of a nazi extermination camp and we insert in this person memories from one officer in that camp?, now in some sense, this person is both the camp survivors and one of the executor. Since we are (in part) our memories, and our memories (our identity) can be read and write.
We don’t have the technology to make a human life last many generations, but maybe we can one day create in a person false memories of living for hundred of years, artificially creating a “mat”. A person so “veteran” on this thing that is living, that would give some awesome advice on living. Maybe?
Is life long or too short? Maybe life is very long but we do not live it correctly.
What if instead of extending life, we invent some drugs to make people experience years of life in hours of time.
Seneca wrote a lot about the Internet. Except he did not knew the Internet existed, so people don’t remember Seneca talking about the internet, but he wrote a lot about it:
Heres seneca talking about “Outside”, the place that is not the Internet, and advising people to visit it.
He also talked about not putting too much time into fanservice and nerd stuff, but I have lost these quotes.
Well, I think the lack of discussion on the gratuitous violence is relative, in that the barriers to graphic violence are already shattered and expected, and the ones to graphic sex/nudity are coming down but not quite on the floor yet - so that is more interesting/sensational to people. If one widens the time perspective a bit to say decades vs years, society will more likely than not be shocked about either soon enough.
But both surely exist and will persist. The limits of each will be tested until finally there are really not limits left. Shows like this are certainly cutting edge in this regard as it pushes the dial further in one direction.
My memory of the books is a bit hazy but I enjoyed the series a lot. I do wonder how much material they can take from the books in future seasons given the liberties they’re taking with some of the plot points though.
In the book, it is a Martian songspire. Nobody knows what it is. It may be alive or it may not. It grows. To paraphrase a xenoarcheologist in the book, someone could be using the secret to FTL as a coaster.
