ALT: Joel Kinnaman as Tak Kovacs in a dark, strange world, wearing a blue coat and shirt; he's looking around in wonder. Oh god, I didn't know whether I could get past the first episode: I love dystopian futures, but this seemed hackneyed... Altered Carbon has the feel of sometimes The Hunger Games , sometimes Harry Potter , often Repo! The Genetic Opera or Gotham City or Narcopolis .There's martial arts, comic booky treatments, digital effects and story content. Some of it is dumb, and the names for things in the future are lazy: The Array is the internet, a sleeve is a host, ONIs are basically smartphones, Poe is like TNG's Data, Meths are the 1%, and paying my chip-implanted fingers is technology that's already here. The "strong, independent woman cop" is the lamest character attempt/trope out there, and the actress is terrible. The producers seem to be trying to appease audiences on every front rather than trying to make a solid, consistent produ...
I saw the Met Opera's HD broadcast of Dr. Atomic by composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars, and while I am already partial to modern opera, it was one of my favourite opera experiences to date. This is the story of JR Oppenheimer and his emotional response to his involvment with the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb in 1945. The music is out of this world and the libretto is so moving--from documentary sources as well as poetry, such as John Donne's. What might strike one as a potentially dry subject was incredibly poignant and hard-hitting simultaneously. Everything about the production was excellent, too: costumes, casting (esp Gerald Findley as the protagonist) and particularly the sets. The Met seems to do a lot of tiering in their opera sets, which I find appealing and flexible in interpretation. This was the encore presentation of the simulcast, but try and catch it in the future--exactly what modern opera should be!
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