Altered Carbon 1: Roads, Spit, and Immortality

Critics who've said that Altered Carbon, the 10-part series I just binged on Netflix (based on the 2002 novel by Richard K. Morgan, which I haven't read) is not as good as Bladerunner, which it strives to be, are myopic - or to put it bluntly, completely wrong.  That's because Altered Carbon is at least as good if not better than the two Bladerunner movies (certainly the second), which it not only exceeds in scope and variety, but plain-out doesn't resemble in crucial ways.

Both are hardboiled cyberpunk, to be sure.   Both therefore entail murder and sets that look like Tokyo on speed.  Both have have sardonic investigators who crack wise.  And both are about the extents and limits of human and human-like minds in human and human-like bodies.

And there the similarities, impressive as they are, end.  Bladerunner is about androids, or artificial, flesh-like beings, with artificially created minds.  Altered Carbon is about transferring human minds to "stacks," composed of a crystal-like substance found on an alien world somewhere out there in space.  These stacks can be put into bodies ("sleeves") that look nothing like the body that housed the original mind, including different genders, and even an adult stacked into a child.  They can also be put into an identical body - "double-sleeved" - or cloned, with the clones having completely identical consciousnesses until the moment of the sleeving and stacking.    The possibilities for love and death (sleeve death of just the body, so the stack can be implanted in some other body vs. "real death" when the stack is destroyed, too) are almost endless.  Freud would have loved it.  I did.

Planets far from Earth are not just a backdrop. Important parts of the narrative occur there.  The characters have a media ecological sense of how minds and bodies intersect (see Human Replay for what that means).  They also understand the pivotal role of media in human history.  Quellcrist (a central character) notes that Rome went from a city to one of the most powerful empires in ancient history because of its "roads" - an observation that comes right out of Harold Innis's Empire and Communications.

The stacks in effect make humans immortal, and in one of the main threads of the story, Quellcrist heads a team of rebels who want to return humans to their pre-stack mortality.   (I like the character, but disagree with her on this, btw.)  Takeshi Kovacs is one of the team, and he's the prime protagonist in this story, which includes solving a murder ("the dead can now accuse their murderers," he aptly says), fighting off potent villains of both genders, and wending, usually fighting, his way against all manner of physical and digital constructs - if he doesn't embrace them - including an AI hotel named the Raven with an Edgar Allan Poe as its concierge avatar.

Joel Kinnaman puts in his best performance on the screen so far - and it's fine indeed - in this role, sometimes even looking a little James Dean.  He spits on a sensor which expected to get his DNA in another package, and is compassionate and brutal as need be.  Convincing acting, too, by Martha Higareda as Ortega, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Quellcrist, Dichen Lachman as Rei, Chris Conner as the aforementioned Poe, and how could I not give a shout-out to Tamara Taylor from Bones.

Slight quibbles: the story is set hundred of years in the future, but the ambience on Earth seems more like just decades away.  And there's one scene in which someone tries to elude attackers by pretending to be dead amongst a group of corpses, but wouldn't the attackers in this far-future scenario be able to digitally scan the area for any signs of life?  But these quibbles are small indeed.

There's plenty of violence (which has received some criticism) as well as nudity of all kinds (I haven't seen any criticism of that) and I think both are right and work well for the series.  There's room for a sequel, which I hope is made (Morgan published two additional novels in this saga).  Laeta Kalogridis gets the "Created by" credit on Wikipedia, and there's a full house of directors, producers, and writers in this powerfully rendered series.  All deserve kudos.

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 1.2 Autofac: Human v Machine

Ok, one more review for the night - of the second standalone episode in Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, now streaming (that is, all ten episodes of this anthology) on Amazon Prime.   (See my review of the first episode for how I'll be reviewing these episodes, if you're interested.)

In Autofac, we have Dick addressing his perennial what's real and what's fantasy, dream, alternate whatever conundrum in a form likely best known these days, and for better than three decades: which one is more human, the android (robot) or the humans who made it/her/him.   This is the theme of Bladerunner, original movie and recent sequel, based on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - two words of which are part of the title of this 2018 streaming series.

Since Autofac is just the second episode I've seen of Electric Dreams, I can't tell you if it captures the essence of Dick's science fiction better than the other episodes.  But I will say it does an outstanding job of presenting the story of which is android and which is human - with the intensity that we might expect to find in HBO's Westworld.  Which in turn means that Amazon Prime in this series is playing on some high intellect/octane terrain indeed, as it did in its other Dick production, The Man in the High Castle.

One of the reasons that Dick has had more of his stories brought to the screen than has Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, and all the masters of science fiction combined, is that he knew how to put twists and turns and surprises right in with the most complex philosophic puzzles.   Autofac has that, and manages to provide a narrative that is fresh and surprising even though its post-apocalyptic setting and artificial intelligence motifs are almost commonplace on the page and the screen.

Top-notch acting by Juno Temple, and it was good to see Revolution's David Lyons back.  Well written for television by Travis Beacham, and sharply directed by Peter Horton.

See also Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams 1.1: Mutually Alternate Realities ... 1.3 Human Is: Compassionate or Alien? ... 1.4 Crazy Diamond: DNA Batteries ... 1.5 The Hood Maker: Telepathy and Police ... 1.6 Safe & Sound: This Isn't A Drill ... 1.7 The Father Thing: Dick from Space ... 1.8 Impossible Planet: Eye of the Beholder ... 1.9 The Commuter: Submitted for Your Approval ... 1.10: Kill All Others: Too Close for Comfort

  
more alternate realities ...

Advantageous: Shimmering Teardrop from the Future

For some reason, I missed Advantageous (Netflix, 2015), and just found it on Uproxx and saw it tonight after searching for the best science fiction movies on Netflix.  It's an apt description.  In fact, Advantageous is an excellent science fiction movie anywhere.

It's been compared to Seconds, the brilliant, pathbreaking 1966 movie, in which older personalities are transferred or cloned into younger bodies.  But Advantageous, though it's about the same theme, is much more hi-tech - in a quiet way - and thus bears resemblances to Blade Runner (original and sequel) and even The Matrix.

But Advantageous is different from all of those movies in that it's more personal.  Gwen wants to transfer her persona into a younger body not for vanity, nor because she's dying or sick or (like the character in Seconds) just bored with her existence.  She needs to transfer because she needs the money she'll receive from it.  She needs this to send her daughter Jules to a good school in this future world.  She'll otherwise lose her job, and her family has let her down.

Director Jennifer Phang does a deft job of portraying Gwen and her daughter close-up, against a backdrop something like Bladerunner and a phone system maybe a few decades into the future.  In addition or underneath or maybe overlay would be a better description there's a watercolor ambience that runs through a lot of this, including a scene that looks like a reflection of Monet's lily pond. Phang co-wrote this with Jacqueline Kim who gives a sensitive performance as Gwen.  Even Samantha Kim (I don't know if they're related) does a fine job as Jules, as does James Urbaniak as her boss and Freya Adams (New Amsterdam!) as Gwen2.

So what we have in Advantageous is a delicately rendered, highly intelligent and provocative science fiction movie.  It may be a minor classic already, on  its way to being just a softly focused, shimmering-like-a-teardrop classic, period.

 

It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...

Bladerunner 2049: The Only Better Movie of this Kind is Bladerunner, and Hey

I loved it.  So did my son Simon, who's now a father of his own.  We loved it almost as much as the original Bladerunner, which we saw more than once on videotape, before there even were DVDs for rent, back in the early 1990s.   That's high praise.  The only reason Bladerunner 2049 wasn't as good as Bladerunner circa 1982 was that the 1982 movie broke so much new ground.  Back in the mid-80s, when I was teaching in the MA in Media Studies Program at the New School, I asked Stephen Jacobs (who then was my student, and has long since become a professor himself, at the Rochester Institute of Technology) to give me an example of cyberpunk.  "Bladerunner" he replied.  It defined the field, at least in the movies.  It was and still is that good.  Not only that, it began Philip K Dick's run of stories made into great movies and TV series, with the current example of The Man in the High Castle on Amazon.  And it inspired me to write The Civil Right of Robots.

But Bladerunner 2049 did as outstanding a job as could be done in a sequel for that kind of movie - moreover, a sequel on the screen some 35 years later.  Rather than reviewing the plot, or even the acting - other than mentioning that both were excellent, and Ryan Gosling as "K" and Harrison Ford reprising his Deckard role were especially excellent - I'll go over certain points and questions which capture this visually and intellectually stunning film (and there will be spoilers):

• Did you catch that "CCCP Soviet" sign on the building in LA?  How could the Soviets still have a sign on a building in 2049?  Maybe Putin managed to restore the Soviet Union?  Possibly.  But I think a better explanation is that Bladerunner 2049 and in turn Bladerunner are and were alternate realities from the outset.  Or, at least they are now.  The Bladerunner of 1982 took place in 2019, in a world that doesn't look much like our world does now, in 2017 (except insofar as Times Square has seemed increasingly Bladerunner-inspired in the past decade). So the makers of Bladerunner 2049 had to make a sequel in a world that looked 30 years later than the world of 2019 and how it was depicted in 1982.  That world has Japan much on its mind - Japan looked like it could become the dominant computer power back then - and, of course, the Soviet Union and Russian were in everyone's head, too.  Bladerunner 2049 has both Russian and Japanese all over the scenes. It could have not flashed Soviet at all,  and benefitted from the unexpected prominence of Russia in our popular culture in the past year.  But instead the sign says CCCP and Soviet - as a shorthand for saying this is the future of Bladerunner 1982/2019, not our future.  Very nice touch.
• Did "K" die at the end?  The convention in movie-making is that if (a) you're very badly wounded, and (b) you're lying motionless with your eyes open, then (c) you're dead.  On the other hand, we've learned that the replicants can only be killed when their brains are destroyed, by a bullet, or, in the case of Niander's evil, powerful, beautiful replicant apprentice, by deprivation of oxygen because K drowned her.  But nothing like that happened to K.  He's been badly wounded - but I'd put my money on his not dying.
• So, is Deckard a replicant or not?  On the yes side, he has a pretty high survival quotient, too.  And he did father a replicant with Rachel, who definitely was a replicant.  But, wait, that's also evidence that he isn't a replicant, right?  I mean, isn't it more likely that human sperm and replicant ovum created a living being, than replicant sperm and replicant ovum?  I think so.  I am a little less sure that Deckard is human than K is alive, but I'd go with Deckard as human if push came to shove.
• I enjoyed the Elvis in what's left of Las Vegas hologram, with a quick shot of Marilyn Monroe thrown in.   (I just published Marilyn and Monet, so I'm always glad to see her given screen time, or for that matter, stage time, as in Anthony Marinelli's Max & Domino which I reviewed here just last week.)  But Elvis belting it out on a stage is a fine homage to David Lynch, and there was a touch of Twin Peaks, somehow, in Bladerunner 2049.

Highly recommend, for the senses and brain.  Bladerunner 2049 is 2017 movie-making at top of its game.  Kudos to Ridley Scott and everyone involved in this movie.

 

It all started in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn Monroe walked off the set of The Misfits and began to hear a haunting song in her head, "Goodbye Norma Jean" ...