Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Kingdom (Netflix Series)



Title:
 Kingdom (Seasons 1 & 2)
Directed by: Kim Seong-hun (S1, S2E1), Park In-je (S2E2-S2E6)
Screenplay by: Kim Eun-hee
Network: Netflix
 
Given the current quarantined state of the coronavirus world and the way modern horror uses zombies as a stand-in for disease, there were probably better things I could have done for my mental health than watch Kingdom, a South Korean mashup of historical drama and zombie horror.

When season 1 came out in 2018, the story probably felt more socio-economic than epidemiological: The king of Joseon (17th century Korea) has fallen ill and rumors circulate he may be dead—but access to the king is fiercely guarded by Cho Hak-ju, his chief advisor, and by Cho’s daughter, who also happens to be the king’s pregnant wife. The king’s older son by a concubine, Lee Chang, stands to inherit the throne if the king dies before the wife gives birth to a son.

Cho accuses Lee of treason and he is forced to flee to the south in search of clues to his father’s illness, accompanied only by his personal bodyguard. He finds the southern provinces ravaged by poverty and starvation, and by a strange plague has begun to turn the inhabitants into crazed, flesh-eating monsters. The wealthy and isolated scholars and aristocrats in the capital remain blind to the danger until it is literally on their doorstep.

Put it that way and it sounds like a companion piece to “Parasite,” the Korean Oscar-winning movie about income inequality and class conflict. However, the show has kind of been overtaken by recent events. Referring to the zombies as “the infected” takes on new resonance now. In the show’s tale of corruption and lust for power, we can perhaps now see the danger these leaders pose to society in a health crisis: They either ignore all danger signs, or are interested only to the extent that they can use the crisis to their own advantage. They remain assured of their own invulnerability until it is far, far too late.

It’s also worth noting that South Korea is emerging from the current crisis as one of the few countries in the world that has managed the virus with anything even remotely approaching success. All that zombie-fighting did them some good, eh?

Each season is composed of six one-hour episodes, making it a quick watch, though I find it kind of falls between two stools—too long for a feature film, too short for subplots or character development.

On the plus side, there’s a kind of streamlined simplicity to the narrative in that all conflict ultimately comes down to the power struggle between the Cho Clan and Crown Prince Lee Chang, but that does leave the world feeling a little thin and the characters as interchangeable as the ridiculous hats everybody wears. (I don’t think any culture’s 17th century dress comes out looking too cool, lace ruffs I’m looking at you, but Joseon Korea’s penchant for mumu-ish silk robes and a pheasant-feathered top hat just strikes me as impractical for a horror actioner).

Both the action and the acting are very melodramatic and Acting-y. The show’s zombies are nocturnal, so tension often requires the sun to drop like Wall Street in a pandemic. Hah, that’s a joke that’ll age like milk. Anyway. Mortally wounded heroes suddenly sprout more arrows than Boromir yet they always find time for five-minute death speeches, while the Queen Consort does little but stare eerily straight at the camera, but it’s serviceable—not Game of Thrones, but not Shannara Chronicles, either. Ryu Seung-ryong as Cho Hak-ju is excellent though, full of ruthless menace, vividly portraying a man to whom a devastating plague is just one more tool to be wielded in his bid to hold on to power.

Netflix continues its tradition of having the dialog and subtitles translated by two different people which can be aurally confusing at times, but the story is so straightforward you could probably get the gist of it even if you watched it in Korean.
 
Ordinarily, I’d recommend this as a refreshing take on the zombie genre, both in terms of setting and style, but through no fault of its own the show gave me stomach cramps, heart palpitations and a sudden need to watch something a little more lighthearted. Though I understand “Contagion” is seeing a resurgence in popularity now, so this is probably exactly what you all want to see. You loonies.

Monday, March 23, 2020

Altered Carbon: Resleeved




Title: Altered Carbon—Resleeved
Directed by: Takeru Nakajima & Yoshiyuki Okuda
Screenplay: Dai Sato & Tsukasa Kondo
Network: Netflix
 
Cyberpunk is a wonderful genre, so fun, so full of cool gadgetry, bass-ass mofos, gangsters, mercs, techno-blitzkrieg action, neon, rain and bare buttocks gyrating to electronica. I love it, really I do. But damn is it a limited, self-referential genre.
 
Show me a cyberpunk cityscape and I won’t be able to tell you if it’s from Altered Carbon, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell or Johnny Mnemonic. Every megacorp in every neon-lit sprawl is owned by a megarich oligarch using technology to oppress, rather than free the average chummer. Every anonymous hacker is fighting against this oppression (rather than doxxing feminists on Facebook or posting neo-Nazi diatribes on Reddit). We get it, cyberpunk: Money, technology and corporations bad, ex-military cyborg mercenaries good!
 
The Japanese have become one of the standard-bearers of the genre, probably because their vending-machine mediated society is already more than halfway there. Akira and Ghost in the Shell in all their branching, self-replicating swarms of comic books, feature films and serialized formats form one of the kernels of Cyberpunk’s programming.
 
Like most works in this narrow (and honestly, creatively spent) genre, the Altered Carbon series by Richard K. Morgan owed more than a little debt to the Japanese, as witnessed by the name of the main character, Takeshi Kovacs.
 
In the spirit of self-recursion then, hot on the heels of season 2 in Netflix’s Altered Carbon adaptation, the property pays homage to its roots with “Resleeved,” an original one-off feature-length prequel to season 1, done in CGIed anime style. (Note: To clarify, it’s a prequel to the series, not the books, as it features elements absent from the books, such as Takeshi’s sister and the idea that Envoys were freedom fighters rather than government stormtroops).
 
In “Resleeved,” Kovacs is hired by the yakuza to protect a tattoo artist who has been targeted by assassins, just as the yakuza syndicate prepares for a ceremony to transfer leadership from one generation to the next. He’s joined by a pink-haired government agent, and a holographic hotel AI (in a blatant and unnecessary copy of a story element from the Altered Carbon series).
 
The story, by screenwriters who’ve worked on Ghost in the Shell’s serialized sibling, the Stand Alone Complex, as well as other oddities like Halo Legends, is … not smart. While the basic concept is sound, the execution is pure edgy teenager trying to impress. The whole movie is essentially five or six fight scenes loosely strung together, with the knots tying each string striving to outdo one another in stupidity: Kovacs is downloaded into a naked body in the middle of an S&M dance club. A yakuza guard gets murdered and his security key stolen—and two days later his key still works just fine. Nobody bothered tracing or cancelling it. A horde of dozens of assassins just wander into a yakuza stronghold, and nobody asks how they gained entry.
 
There’s nothing new here, either conceptually or visually.
 
While exactly how the big bad executes his nefarious plan is different in its colorful details, involving a tattoo and Altered Carbon's concept of digitized consciousness and the ability to switch bodies, we’ve done yakuza to death, the city is pure Blade Runner: 2049 and they’ve even reused the hotel AI idea from the Netflix show.
 
Visually, the action is pure manga, with blood splattering across walls, floors, ceilings and the “camera” lens as samurai swords gleefully bisect bodies at every angle like something straight out of Ninja Scrolls. There’s an energy and exuberance to the shot composition, I’ll grant you, reminiscent of “The Witness” segment from “Love, Death and Robots” but for the most part it’s nothing we haven’t been seeing in the genre for the last 20 years, just CGed up a bit.
 
I don’t expect every pop culture product to deliver a grand statement on the Way Life Is and the Nature of the Human Condition, but I just found this a little too derivative, a little too gore-passing-for-cool, a little too I’ve-seen-this-before.
 
One last thing: Oddly, the English voice acting and the English subtitles appear to have been created by people working from two different versions of the script—or the original Japanese script was translated by two different people, one for the voice actors, one for the subtitles. Anyway, the two frequently don’t match up, which can be a little disorienting if you’re listening with the subtitles on.

Sunday, March 1, 2020

Altered Carbon (Season 2)



Title: Altered Carbon (Season 2)
Showrunners: Laeta Kalogridis, Alison Schapker
Writers: Laeta Kalogridis, Sarah Nicole Jones, Michael R. Perry, Sang Kyu Kim, Cortney Norris, Adam Lash, Cori Uchida, Nevin Densham, Alison Schapker, Elizabeth Padden
Network: Netflix

While the very word “Adaptation” implies change, I wish more adapters would err on the side of changing too little rather than too much. This Carbon would have been better if they’d altered it a bit less.

The Altered Carbon series on Netflix is an adaptation of a three-book series about super-soldier turned lone gun for hire Takeshi Kovacs, by author Richard K. Morgan. Series 1, released in 2018, covered the first book in the series, which I wrote about here and here. If you’re lazy, and hey we’re on the Internet so yeah, the gee-whiz SF premise is that human consciousness can be digitized, stored in a “stack” implanted in the spine, and downloaded into any available “sleeve” (what people in far future land call bodies).

This second incarnation of the Altered Carbon series is a bit of a mashup—in the messiest sense of the word—of elements from books 2 and 3 of the Takeshi Kovacs series, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, altered to the point of almost unrecognizability.

Carrera and Kemp from Broken Angels show up, though their motivations and characters are completely altered. The setting has been moved to Harlan’s World, as in Woken Furies, and it follows book 3’s hunt for legendary rebel leader Quellcrist Falconer plot line, though of course they had to make this literal by turning it into a hunt for the actual person rather than a copy of her consciousness. As I said before, we are in the age of incredibly literal SF. Oshima from book 3 is transformed into a black lesbian woman named Trepp (Simone Missick), though amazingly without raising the kind of outcry that casting white actor Joel Kinnaman to play a white character with a half-Japanese half-Czech name did in season 1.

Can’t imagine why not.

If you’ve never read the books that’s going to make as much sense as alien hieroglyphs, so here’s the plot: Kovacs (played by Anthony Mackie this time) is convinced his long-vanished lover Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry) is still alive. He is lured back to his home world of Harlan’s World by the prospect of finding her, only to discover he is suspected of murdering a cabal of super-rich “Meths” (short for methuselah because of their money-fueled longevity). He enlists the aid of Trepp and Poe (Chris Conner), the holographic hotel AI from season 1, and is hunted by Colonel Carrera (Torben Liebrecht), who creates a clone of Kovacs based on a stored copy of Kovac’s consciousness (Will Yun Lee) to help track down the fugitives.  

None of these details actually matter much. Here’s what the show is like to watch: Bam! Aaah! Watch out! [Voiceover] Memories, are, like, ghosts, you know? Nanoswarm! The construct is destabilizing! Smash! Waaugh! Gyaaa! The End.

The first two episodes in particular are written by idiots for idiots.

Two examples from the first couple of episodes may illustrate:

Kovacs is stabbed in the shoulder and knocked unconscious. He awakes with no memory of what happened. To make himself remember, he stabs himself in the shoulder. Thank god his assailant didn’t kick him in the testicles.

In another scene, Colonel Carrera and four of his men (despite being a Colonel, Carrera only seems to have about four—alas for streaming TV budgets) investigate the scene of a murder. The police allow them in, but confiscate their weapons (why, I have no idea). Carrera and his men kill the cops anyway: Carrera takes one cop’s gun, shoots the cop, then tosses it to one of his men, who does a pirouette and then shoots another cop, the ballet guy then tosses the gun to yet another solider, who does a backflip, then shoots a third cop, backflippy tosses the gun YET AGAIN … Anyway, at the end of it all Carrera reports everything he found at the crime scene without covering anything up, so. What. The. Fuck. Was that all in aid of?

The dialog is enjoyable in its schlocky cheesiness. Colonel Carrera gets most of the best (worst) lines: “If we’re talking wolves, I’m the alpha and you’re nothing but my bitch.” Though frankly this is slightly let down by the fact that as the big bad, Carrera looks like a middle-aged metrosexual with about as much menace as Mark Ruffalo.

There are attempts at a serious tone, with laboring weighty voiceovers about the way we are are haunted by memories and vainly attempt to recreate our pasts, but the seriousness is undercut by the nonsensical action. The treatment of the virtual and digital is especially silly: Poe, the holographic AI, carries a shotgun, drinks whiskey and manipulates other programs by waving his hands around in midair.

To be honest, the show doesn’t seem that interested in its own themes, anyway. Character motivations are impossible to follow and don’t matter, as every problem is resolved by punching or shooting things. Carrera is working against the planet’s governor, no he’s working for her, Quellcrist is a murderer, no she’s a victim, no she’s a willing accomplice. Clone Kovacs is a ruthless killer who murders Trepp’s father, no he’s a caring, sensitive guy you’d like if you got to know him personally. Maybe if given enough time these changes would sit better, but with a season of just eight episodes character arcs get rushed in the mad dash to get through the convoluted plot involving about four double-crosses and a lot of unconvincing technobabble.

I get that streaming TV is not words on paper, and each medium imposes different needs. However, as I argued with Star Trek Discovery, if all you keep is the surface level stuff—the names and places, some of the technology, one or two lines—then why not go all the way and make something totally new? Using original works of fiction for little more than name recognition feels an uncomfortable combination of both horribly cynical and terribly hubristic—assuming you as the TV writer know better how to craft a story than the bestselling author whose works you’re plundering for your story line.

Think back to the Lord of the Rings movies, probably the best-loved and most widely acclaimed SF/Fantasy adaptations in recent memory (Game of Thrones had a shot at the title before that last season, sigh). Now, what do people remember about those movies? Was it Legolas surfing down an elephant’s trunk while no-scoping orcs with his bow? Was it Aragorn somehow grabbing a green ghost by the neck and threatening it with his sword? Was it the incredibly literal interpretation of the all-seeing eye of Sauron as a gigantic searchlight? Or—or were these dismissed as risible additions by the writers to an otherwise vivid portrayal of one of the classics of modern English literature?

The Takeshi Kovacs books are certainly no Lord of the Rings, but there was a core to them, a bitter suspicion of the corrosive effects that the convergence of money and technology into the hands of a few can have, but also a deep wariness of fanatics and extremists of any stripe—people who believe deeply in a cause often don’t care too much about the people who follow it. That gets thrown out the window—season 2 ends with Quellcrist vowing to travel to some other planet to continue her bloody revolution.

It’s a light, mildly diverting, disposable time-filler, something Netflix can dump on the service to keep you busy for a week or two until the next show comes around, but that’s pretty much the only mileage I got out of it.