A Break from Cyberpunk: Broken Angels

Title: Broken Angels
Author: Richard Morgan
Publisher: Gollancz

In this semi-sequel to Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's body hopping anti-hero Takeshi Kovacs returns, this time to take two-fisted aim at corporate greed and the commercialization of war.  

Sixty years after the events of Carbon (which is referenced briefly once then promptly forgotten), Kovacs is now a mercenary fighting on the revolution-wracked world of Sanction IV, where rebels are liberally dispensing nukes to anyone they don't like, while the corporate-backed cartel government is using even worse weapons.

In the midst of all this, Kovacs is approached by a deserter from the rebel side with a proposition: help uncover a 'Martian' artifact found on the planet, and help everyone involved become filthy rich. (Martians being the colloquial name for a race of presumably-extinct highly advanced aliens whose ruins mankind has discovered).

To that end, Kovacs assembles a team consisting of such Dirty Dozen tropes as the Demolitions Expert, the Ninja Assassin, the Hotshot Pilot and you get the idea. They all go traipsing off to a highly irradiated beach that will inevitably kill them all as they dig for said artifact.

Oh that's right, this is the universe where people's consciousness is digitally backed up in a 'cortical stack' implanted inside their spines, allowing them to be ported from one body to another or even squirted across space to another star. 

Now, being backed up strikes me as being pretty cold comfort if you're dead (Morgan establishes in graphic detail that getting shot in the head still kills you--the stack is a backup, not the real you). I could see it being a kind of life insurance deal (at least my family will be provided for, etc.) in the event of accidental death, but in Broken Angels a whole platoon of guys go into a hot zone knowing they are 100% positively absotively going to die, and comfort themselves with the knowledge that their digital selves will enjoy a reward afterwards. That seems a trifle ... psychotic. No?

Removed from Altered Carbon's urban setting this feels much more military scifi than cyberpunk, though to be honest the secret elite crack super-soldier crack elite super squad do very little but die of radiation exposure and have graphic sex with Kovacs.

And can I point out how creepy it is to have vivid sex scenes in a book that's written in first person? Who exactly are we supposed to imagine Kovacs is telling all these slippery, gushy, wet and wild stories to? I wish I could say this was an indication Kovacs is an unreliable narrator who is far too into himself, but the rest of the book is presented as fact. I just picture the interviewer or amanuensis's horrified face as Kovacs wades into excruciating details about glands and secretions and thrusting and moaning. Hope they were paid well.

The message is presented with a little more nuance here than in Altered Carbon, even if the message itself is still not terribly subtle. In Altered Carbon, it was 'rich=bad, so rise up and murder the bastards.' Here, corporations that profit from war are in the target sights, but so are fanatics who use their revolutionary fervor to justify their revolting actions. It's balanced, but it does rather mean it reaches conclusions as trite as 'war is bad,' 'ruthless companies are bad' and 'fanaticism is bad.'

All that said, this is my favorite of the three Kovacs books. A sense of impending doom builds throughout the book, with the soldiers working to unravel the mystery before radiation unravels their DNA, culminating in an apocalyptic burst of action that is much more original and satisfying than, say, Altered Carbon's endless techno-ninja shenanigans. On the other hand, that does mean it's more slow-moving, which may test the patience of people expecting more of the same from the last book.

Altered Johansson: Ghost in the Shell

Title: Ghost in the Shell
Director: Ruper Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman)
Screenplay: Jamie Moss, William Wheeler, Ehren Kruger

Let's get one thing out of the way right from the start: This isn't very good. What's interesting to me is the similarities to Netflix's recent cyberpunky titstravaganza, Altered Carbon, and the way they both fail for much the same reasons.

The main problems are the cast--the wrong people in the wrong roles--and the movie's attempts to "humanize" the heroes when the dehumanizing, alienating impact of body-invasive technology is the whole bleeding point.

Not because of the whitewashing thing--as I mentioned in the Altered Carbon review, living in Japan puts a different perspective on the issue for me: Lack of Japanese representation is not really a problem in Japan. On account of it being chock full of Japanese, I suppose. The other point being the silliness of insisting on the 'correct' ethnicity of a character that is, let's be clear about this, a purple-haired cyborg. I'm not saying Hollywood shouldn't make more effort to cast Asians in roles other than kung fu masters and wise old karate sensei. Just saying this is a pretty damn stupid hill to die on.

So Scarlett Johansson as the Major doesn't bug me because of whitewashing. It bugs me because this is absolutely the wrong role for her, wrong, wrong, pouring the milk before adding the cereal wrong. She can do silent and weird or creepy (as in Under the Skin), but the script wants her to alternate between kickass cyberninja and little girl lost/confused about who she is, and it does not work. At all. She looks like she's trying to remember her lines, not her past.

The reason they have her moping around looking like her hamster just died is the writers have decided, just as they did in Altered Carbon, that the hero wasn't sympathetic enough, so they've stuffed her backstory full of cyberpunk tropes 101 and shrunken their world so that absolutely everything revolves around her and this little voyage of discovery she goes on.

Pilou Asbaek (Game of Thrones) is better than I expected given how over-the-top his scenes in GoT are, but he's barely in the movie. Pretty much the only non-Johansson to get some decent screen time is "Beat" Takeshi Kitano who--again this is a living in Japan thing--strikes me as having all the gravitas of a whoopee cushion with none of the sophistication. Doesn't help that he doesn't speak English, so he's literally the only one in the whole movie delivering his lines in Japanese.

Sure there's one or two cool set pieces (like the clip above), but they're lifted directly from the original anime, so I'm reluctant to even give points there--there are entire scenes that are shot-for-shot remakes, just to rub your face in how unnecessary this movie is. What else? The cars look like unfinished video game models, the cityscape is Blade Runner done cheap, and the climax is a total cop-out on the whole message of the movie.

If you must scratch the cyberpunk itch, watch Altered Carbon (for punches and boobs) or Blade Runner (for moody introspection) instead.

The Sky Crawlers

Title: The Sky Crawlers
Director: Mamoru Oshii
Screenplay: Chihiro Ito

Recently got the urge to watch something about aerial combat, and remembered this little 2008 Japanese animated movie. I mention it for two reasons: One, the dogfighting scenes are amazing. Watch the video. Second, it strikes me as a shining example of the dangers of applying Western critical thought to foreign movies.

The Sky Crawlers presents a world without war, in which companies are hired to wage air battles for show, with airplanes piloted by zombie-faced teenagers. The hero's squadron is in turn terrorized by an enemy ace known only as the "Teacher," while the hero himself struggles to understand what happened to the pilot he replaced.

A lot of reviews--like this one or this one zero in on an apparent anti-war message. In one scene, one of the main characters even appears to lay down this message like a butcher setting out slabs of meat: War is part of human nature, she says, and if there were ever no war we would have to invent it.

Now there's nothing the Internet likes more than to say "Actually..." so let me break in here to say "Actually..." Westerners are missing the subtext. The fact that the enemy ace is called the Teacher--such as a HIGH SCHOOL teacher--is not random. The fact that all the pilots are HIGH SCHOOL AGED teenagers is not random. The fact that pilots speak Japanese on the ground but English (which is taught in Japanese HIGH SCHOOLS) in the air is not random.

I'm even suspicious of the above-mentioned scene where the character appears to state the theme. She does so in a very droning, glass-eyed way, suggesting someone who has been taught what to say by rote: Rote learning is one of the most criticized aspects of teaching at Japanese HIGH SCHOOLS.

This movie is a very strong strong criticism of the Japanese educational system, claiming that it mass-produces cannon fodder who are mercilessly torn apart by their Teacher, and by a world that applauds rather than cries over their suffering.

Anway, great dogfighting scenes, a bit slow, but an interesting glimpse into the Japanese psyche.

The Expanse (Seasons 1 and 2)

Title: The Expanse (Season 1: 2015, Season 2: 2017)
Developed by: Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
Network: Netflix (Syfy)

The Expanse is a space opera series based on the book series of the same name by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, and one of the few things I'll review on here (other than Iain M Banks' Use of Weapons) that I unreservedly like. It's engaging, it's refreshing, it feels genuinely new the way the sixth Star Trek, the second Battlestar Galactica or the third Stargate series never will.

It's got a slightly harder real-world science feel, though interplanetary travel still happens at the speed of the plot but LOOK HUSH YOU NEVER MIND, and vastly harder real-word politics as the solar system is divided between Earth and Mars, with natives from the asteroid belt and Jovian moons called Belters caught in the middle.

It's one of the few properties to get gritty/grimdark RIGHT. Game of Thrones and its imitators would have you believe that the black hats always win, the white ones lose, or if they do by some miracle not cock up everything irretrievably, it's by learning how to be arseholes.

But that's just as simplistic as the space operas and fantasies that grimdark has shivved on its way to the throne of popular culture. What the Expanse does is understand that reality is messy, people are messy, and if you want to be really gritty you've got to reflect that.

The characters are screwed up, sometimes trying to do the right thing, not always quite succeeding. Thomas Jane is an early standout as Joe Miller, a crooked cop assigned to track down a rich man's rebellious daughter, who gradually grows a conscience and a cause.

The pacing is a little odd, I'll give you that. The real climax from the first book takes place in the middle of season 2. Season 1 just kind of, like, abruptly ends, a bit like this se

The only genuine downside here is that it's so good, watching this show has kind of spoiled me on Star Trek Discovery, shining a spotlight on how cartoonish ST:D's attempts at seriousness are and how overly-reliant on cheap, unearned twists it is.

Altered Carbon: Episode 1

Title: Altered Carbon, Episode 1
Director: Miguel Sapochnik
Network: Netflix

The Basics

Based on the Richard K Morgan book of the same name.

Revolutionary idealist and guerrilla/rebel-turned-mercenary Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman) gets cornered and killed by government enforcers on an alien planet. Luckily, he and everyone else has a digitized backup of his brain (which makes zero sense), so 250 years later he is downloaded into the body of a 38-year-old Swedish-American actor who starred in the RoboCop reboot and Suicide Squad. Nice work if you can get it.

Turns out he's been sprung from digital prison by the richest man in the world and the best thing in HBO's "Rome" (Laurens Bancroft and James Purefoy, respectively) to solve the man's own murder. In return, he's offered a full pardon and (Dr Evil pose) ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Being a good revolutionary, he tells Mr 0.1% to go stuff himself, until he gets ambushed at his hotel by a posse of hitmen (see video). 

Also along for the ride is the detective assigned to the Bancroft case, Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda) and a whole lot of boobies. 

Fist Impressions (sic)

It's so deliriously over the top in everything it does--like it's been adapted by a bunch of 16 year olds--that it's easy to forgive the clunky exposition and wooden acting.

Definitely the show seems to believe that more is more. For example, the above scene in the book involves just two hitmen, who get taken out by a single Gatling gun. Here, there's half a dozen who get blown to pieces in an extended bloodbath by TWO machine guns, plus the hotel AI bartender has a shotgun (which is obviously needed when you have two sentry guns firing 100 rounds a second each), plus Kovacs does a bunch of punching and kicking in the middle of the bulletstorm.

Same with the prologue. In the book, Kovacs gets ambushed by a couple of paramilitaries, who gun him down on the spot. In the show, there is an extended gun battle replete with people hiding from assault rifle bullets behind that byword for armor plating, a kitchen counter.

The sleazy sexiness is also in full Showgirls mode, with a surprisingly high number of tits on the screen at any given moment. Detective Ortega takes Kovacs for an expository drink at  a strip club, so if anyone asks why I was there, I'll tell them it's because I was solving JFK's murder.

Dialogue is clunky, as people stand around declaiming the backstory. Kinnaman is fine in the action scenes, but I wish the directors wouldn't ask him to do anything more complicated than punch things. He isn't quite nasty enough to pull off the go-fuck-yourself attitude of his lines, nor does he put enough menace into Kovacs' threats.

The Sights and Sound of Music

The music is loud and proud too, with some sudden & intrusive outbursts of pop songs throughout the episode. One erupts over scenes of Kovacs going on a bender (that was ironically one of the tamer scenes: drugs in Altered Carbon come in eyedroppers stolen from Looper, and Kinnaman plays "high" with a roundeyed dazed expression) where it fits, the second time over a cityscape scene where the saccharine tone was just out of place. 

It doesn't quite pull off the claustrophobic crowdedness or Escher-esque geometries of a cyberpunk city, and everything is way, way too clean -- partly due to budget I guess, but partly because the camera tends to switch from medium shot to close-up, never really pulling back to give us a sense of space, until it pulls aaaall the way out and the cityscape looks like a Christmas ornament. There's one or two scenes at the start of Kovacs' drug-fuelled adventure that get a little of the sense of scope... but there hasn't been anything too neato yet.

Finally, the politics of the book seem more or less present. The mega-rich "own everything now," including our bodies, and in Kovacs' case, even our souls. Indeed, it looks like this part is going to be played up even more than it was in the book, with Kovacs changed from follower of quasi-Mao/Ho Chih Minh figure Quellcrist Falconer, to an associate/contemporary. A few other changes from page to screen also reflect this new focus--Kovacs has changed from government enforcer gone rogue to out-and-out revolutionary.

Despite that, I'd actually say the politics of the show has been one of the more subtly done things, which isn't saying much for an episode that opens with a lesbian shower scene, letting you figure out for yourself the implications of economic inequality.

Anyway, I love to complain, but on balance it's shlocky good fun, that unlike Bright actually has some ideas in the background.

Asianwashing

That's the episode, now it's time to rant.

Before this came out there was the utterly predictable criticism of "whitewashing" the semi-Japanese main character, despite the fact that (A) said character's surname is Kovacs, and (B) the entire point of the series is that digitizing consciousness means what you look like is disconnected from who you are. But now that I've seen it, I must agree I am deeply disappointed in the choice of casting: You see, two actors play Kovacs' earlier (Asian) incarnations, Leonardo Nam and Will Yun Lee. His sister is played by Dichen Lachman. None of them are Japanese.

Joel Kinnaman playing a white guy I buy. But hiring Koreans and Nepalese to play the roles of Japanese characters smacks of the worst kind of racism: Do all Asians look the same? 

I'm not being facetious: every Japanese person I've ever talked to has been fine with Hollywood actors playing Asian roles, but incensed when Chinese are hired to play Japanese. It's all a matter of perspective. 

Now, that's a totally over the top overreaction, but illustrates the point: once you start insisting people of the correct ethnicity play every role, where does it stop? At some arbitrary line the actual people involved don't care about. 

I hate the creeping sensation that I'm becoming a get-off-my-lawn style old man, but the older I get, the more convinced I am that each generation is just as bigoted as the next, just about different things. Sigh. The perils of allowing the Internet to mediate your relationship with your own culture, I guess.