But There IS Joel Kinnaman...
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 product.
But I stuck with it. There is some humour in it. It does have some cool theological moments; indeed, the Vatican's going to hate this show, mark my words.
The hearing accessibility has issues, though...
IDing speakers is inconsistent, as are sound effect verb forms.There are too many missing or wrong words. The captioner usually (but not consistently) omits F-bombs, which is against Netflix house style. This is particularly problematic when, for instans, Poe mentions Tak's obscenities but we've seen none. The captions are useless a lot of the time: I've never seen so much white font placed over white or light background!
And WTH is up with the Deaf character (I think the actor is Jess Edmond)? How come everyone else has internal language interpretation that is subtitled to us but Maddy is only partially subtitled? Is he sub-par, somehow? When someone speaks in another language, it says [in Spanish]:blah blah blah. When he signs, first he gets translated without acknowledgement of ASL as a language (should be [in ASL]:
Altered Carbon Season 1 Episode 2 Netflix (accessed 2018) ALT Fair, bearded man in teal shirt and suspenders and burgundy bow tie signing at an overhead-lit poker table. The subtitle reads: "You're weird! Who cares about humans?"
and the next time not at all: his words are taken away from him by having Poe restate.
I have added several images to my Craption Fail portfolio.
And that's another bandwagon they're being lazy about: seems like every show going thinks there's a currency of cool to have a Deaf character.
After seven episodes, I can say it's pretty silly but very addictive. Sort of like The 100.
Comments