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.