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Altered Carbon on your telly!


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I saw a poster today, Altered Carbon will be on netflix from February 2nd!

 

A trailer is here - https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwit1rbP1-TYAhXIKVAKHV_rDBsQtwIIKjAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DdhFM8akm9a4&usg=AOvVaw3PRKFH5-M3HD2mpeS7zLex

 

I've read the Richard Morgan books several times over the years and have always been impressed.

I only hope the programme/series lives up to that level.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Pete in Lincs said:

I only hope the programme/series lives up to that level.

The sum of all my fears.  :mellow:

 

Apparently the author had some involvement in the production (but that didn't prevent Watchmen from getting a good dumbing down).

 

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I've never read/seen the original Watchmen literature.

I quite liked the film though. It probably could have been better,

but was good enough for me at the time as I didn't have any preconceived images of it I suppose.

I love the Discworld novels, yet I'm not too impressed by the films that were made.

They were well made, but....

I think when we read a novel we form our own ideas in our heads of what it should look like.

When we then watch the film we see what was in someone else's head & it doesn't always match.

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On 19/01/2018 at 8:28 PM, Pete in Lincs said:

I've never read/seen the original Watchmen literature.

You should take steps on that front fella, the real thing runs a lot deeper than the film.....You can find the graphic novel for well under twenty notes and I guarantee you won't just read it once, you'll have to go back and find all the clues  :coolio:

 

One positive thing that comparison with the graphic novel does confirm is just what a bloody marvellous job the film's production team did of capturing individual visual images (the frames of the graphic novel if you will), but somehow they lost the story along the way.  :unsure:

 

watchmen-comic-film-thumb.jpg12681755.jpg

 

I guess this is why I'm worried for 'Altered Carbon'.....The production team have a free hand with the visuals, will they actually bother to pay any attention to the storyline?  :shrug:

 

PS - Anybody read Walter John Willams' 'Hardwired' or Neil Stephenson's 'Snowcrash'?  Now there are two books just screaming to be made into films.....By the right team.  :pray:

 

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Snowcrash Chapter One:

 



Chapter One

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway-might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn't want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn't get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.

Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren't afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deiverator puts the hammer down, poo-poo happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the thee asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The De liverator's erator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the wiffle they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can wiffling stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—you know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:

music
movies
microcode (software),
high-speed pizza delvery

The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."

So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved—but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: the Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

Oh, they used to argue over times, many corporate driver-years lost to it: homeowners, red-faced and sweaty with their own lies, stinking of Old Spice and job-related stress, standing in their glowing yellow doorways brandishing their Seikos and waving at the clock over the kitchen sink, I swear, can't you guys tell time?

Didn't happen anymore. Pizza delivery is a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was wiffling inalienable. Sent psychologists out to these people's houses, gave them a free TV set to submit to an anonymous interview, hooked them to polygraphs, studied their brain waves as they showed them choppy, inexplicable movies of porn queens and late-night car crashes and Sammy Davis, Jr., put them in sweet-smelling, mauve-walled rooms and asked them questions about Ethics so perplexing that even a Jesuit couldn't respond without committing a venial sin.

The analysts at CosaNostra Pizza University concluded that it was just human nature and you couldn't fix it, and so they went for a quick cheap technical fix: smart boxes. The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalanceproducing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator's head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator's car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box's builtin RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down.

If the thirty-minute deadline expires, news of the disaster is flashed to CosaNostra Pizza Headquarters and relayed from there to Uncle Enzo himself—the Sicilian Colonel Sanders, the Andy Griffith of Bensonhurst, the straight razor-swinging figment of many a Deliverator's nightmares, the Capo and prime figurehead of CosaNostra Pizza, Incorporated—who will be on the phone to the customer within five minutes, apologizing profusely. The next day, Uncle Enzo will land on the customer's yard in a jet helicopter and apologize some more and give him a free trip to Italy—all he has to do is sign a bunch of releases that make him a public figure and spokesperson for CosaNostra Pizza and basically end his private life as he knows it. He will come away from the whole thing feeling that, somehow, he owes the Mafia a favor.

The Deliverator does not know for sure what happens to the driver in such cases, but he has heard some rumors. Most pizza deliveries happen in the evening hours, which Uncle Enzo considers to be his private time. And how would you feel if you had to interrupt dinner with your family in order to call some obstreperous dork in a Burbclave and grovel for a late wiffling pizza? Uncle Enzo has not put in fifty years serving his family and his country so that, at the age when most are playing golf and bobbling their granddaughters, he can get out of the bathtub dripping wet and lie down and kiss the feet of some sixteen-year-old skate punk whose pepperoni was thirty-one minutes in coming. Oh, God. It makes the Deliverator breathe a little shallower just to think of the idea.

But he wouldn't drive for CosaNostra Pizza any other way. You know why? Because there's something about having your life on the line. It's like being a kamikaze pilot. Your mind is clear. Other people—store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America—other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster and better than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things.

What a wiffling rat race that is. CosaNostra Pizza doesn't have any competition. Competition goes against the Mafia ethic. You don't work harder because you're competing against some identical operation down the street. You work harder because everything is on the line. Your name, your honor, your family, your life. Those burger flippers might have a better life expectancy—but what kind of life is it anyway, you have to ask yourself. That's why nobody, not even the Npponese, can move pizzas faster than CosaNostra. The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED digits blazing proud numbers into the night: 12:32 or 15:15 or the occasional 20:43.

The Deliverator is assigned to CosaNostra Pizza #3569 in the Valley. Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot. Not enough roads for the number of people. Fairlanes, Inc. is laying new ones all the time. Have to bulldoze lots of neighborhoods to do it, but those seventies and eighties developments exist to be bulldozed, right? No sidewalks, no schools, no nothing. Don't have their own police force-no immigration control—undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even harassed. Now a Burbclave, that's the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything.

The Deliverator was a corporal in the Farms of Merryvale State Security Force for a while once. Got himself fired for pulling a sword on an acknowledged perp. Slid it right through the fabric of the perp's shirt, gliding the flat of the blade along the base of his neck, and pinned him to a warped and bubbled expanse of vinyl siding on the wall of the house that the perp was trying to break into. Thought it was a pretty righteous bust. But they fired him anyway because the perp turned out to be the son of the vice-chancellor of the Farms of Merryvale. Oh, the weasels had an excuse: said that a thirty-six-inch samurai sword was not on their Weapons Protocol. Said that he had violated the SPAC, the Suspected Perpetrator Apprehension Code. Said that the perp had suffered psychological trauma. He was afraid of butter knives now; he had to spread his jelly with the back of a teaspoon. They said that he had exposed them to liability.

The Deliverator had to borrow some money to pay for it. Had to borrow it from the Mafia, in fact. So he's in their database now—retinal patterns, DNA, voice graph, fingerprints, footprints, palm prints, wrist prints, every wiffling part of the body that had wrinkles on it—almost—those sweethearts rolled in ink and made a print and digitized it into their computer. But it's their money—sure they're careful about loaning it out. And when he applied for the Deliverator job they were happy to take him, because they knew him. When he got the loan, he had to deal personally with the assistant vice-capo of the Valley, who later recommended him for the Deliverator job. So it was like being in a family. A really scary, twisted, abusive family.

CosaNostra Pizza #3569 is on Vista Road just down from Kings Park Mall. Vista Road used to belong to the State of California and now is called Fairlanes, Inc. Rte. CSV-5. Its main competition used to be a U.S. highway and is now called Cruiseways, Inc. Rte. Cal-12. Farther up the Valley, the two competing highways actually cross. Once there had been bitter disputes, the intersection closed by sporadic sniper fire. Finally, a big developer bought the entire intersection and turned it into a drivethrough mall. Now the roads just feed into a parking system—not a lot, not a ramp, but a system-and lose their identity. Getting through the intersection involves tracing paths through the parking system, many braided filaments of direction like the Ho Chi Minh trail. CSV-5 has better throughput, but Cal-12 has better pavement. That is typical-Fairlanes roads emphasize getting you there, for Type A drivers, and Cruiseways emphasize the enjoyment of the ride, for Type B drivers.

The Deliverator is a Type A driver with rabies. He is zeroing in on his home base, CosaNostra Pizza #3569, cranking up the left lane of CSV-5 at a hundred and twenty kilometers. His car is an invisible black lozenge, just a dark place that reflects the tunnel of franchise signs-the loglo. A row of orange lights burbles and chums across the front, where the grille would be if this were an air-breathing car. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in through people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconscious, and unearths terrible fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire.

The loglo, overhead, marking out CSV-5 in twin contrails, is a body of electrical light made of innumerable cells, each cell designed in Manhattan by imageers who make more for designing a single logo than a Deliverator will make in his entire lifetime. Despite their efforts to stand out, they all smear together, especially at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. Still, it is easy to see CosaNostra Pizza #3569 because of the billboard, which s wide and tall even by current inflated standards. In fact, the squat franchise itself looks like nothing more than a low-slung base for the great aramid fiber pillars that thrust the billboard up into the trademark firmament. Marca Registrada, baby.

The billboard is a classic, a chestnut, not a figment of some fleeting Mafia promotional campaign. It is a statement, a monument built to endure. Simple and dignified. It shows Uncle Enzo in one of his spiffy Italian suits. The pinstripes glint and flex like sinews. The pocket square is luminous. His hair is perfect, slicked back with something that never comes off, each strand cut off straight and square at the end by Uncle Enzo's cousin, Art the Barber, who runs the second-largest chain of lowend haircutting establishments in the world. Uncle Enzo is standing there, not exactly smiling, an avuncular glint in his eye for sure, not posing like a model but standing there like your uncle would, and it says

The Mafia
you've got a friend in The Family!
paid for by the Our Thing Foundation


The billboard serves as the Deliverator's polestar. He knows that when he gets to the place on CSV-5 where the bottom corner of the billboard is obscured by the pseudo-Gothic stained-glass arches of the local Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates franchise, it's time for him to get over into the right lanes where the retards and the bimbo boxes poke along, random, indecisive, looking at each passing franchise's driveway like they don't know if it's a promise or a threat.

He cuts off a bimbo box-a family minivan-veers past the Buy 'n' Fly that is next door, and pulls into CosaNostra Pizza #3569. Those big fat contact patches complain, squeal a little hit, but they hold on to the patented Fairlanes, Inc. high-traction pavement and guide him into the chute. No other Deliverators are waiting in the chute. That is good, that means high turnover for him, fast action, keep moving that 'za. As he scrunches to a stop, the electromechanical hatch on the flank of his car is already opening to reveal his empty pizza slots, the door clicking and folding back in on itself like the wing of a beetle. The slots are waiting. Waiting for hot pizza.

And waiting. The Deliverator honks his horn. This is not a nominal outcome.

Window slides open. That should never happen. You can look at the three-ring binder from CosaNostra Pizza University, cross-reference the citation for window, chute, dispatcher's, and it will give you all the procedures for that window—and it should never be opened. Unless something has gone wrong.

The window slides open and—you sitting down? smoke comes out of it. The Deliverator hears a discordant beetling over the metal hurricane of his sound system and realizes that it is a smoke alarm, coming from inside the franchise.

Mute button on the stereo. Oppressive silence—his eardrums uncringe-the window is buzzing with the cry of the smoke alarm. The car idles, waiting. The hatch has been open too long, atmospheric pollutants are congealing on the electrical contacts in the back of the pizza slots, he'll have to clean them ahead of schedule, everything is going exactly the way it shouldn't go in the three-ring binder that spells out all the rhythms of the pizza universe.

Inside, a football-shaped Abkhazian man is running to and fro, holding a three-ring binder open, using his spare tire as a ledge to keep it from collapsing shut; he runs with the gait of a man carrying an egg on a spoon. He is shouting in the Abkhazian dialect; all the people who run CosaNostra pizza franchises in this part of the Valley are Abkhazian immigrants.

It does not look like a serious fire. The Deliverator saw a real fire once, at the Farms of Merryvale, and you couldn't see anything for the smoke. That's all it was: smoke, burbling out of nowhere, occasional flashes of orange light down at the bottom, like heat lightning in tall clouds. This is not that kind of fire. It is the kind of fire that just barely puts out enough smoke to detonate the smoke alarms. And he is losing time for this poo-poo.

The Deliverator holds the horn button down. The Abkhazian manager comes to the window. He is 'supposed to use the intercom to talk to drivers, he could say anything he wanted and it would be piped straight into the Deliverator's car, but no, he has to talk face to face, like the Deliverator is some kind of wiffling ox cart driver. He is red-faced, sweating, his eyes roll as he tries to think of the English words.

"A fire, a little one," he says.

The Deliverator says nothing. Because he knows that all of this is going onto videotape. The tape is being pipelined, as it happens, to CosaNostra Pizza University, where it will be analyzed in a pizza management science laboratory. It will be shown to Pizza University students, perhaps to the very students who will replace this man when he gets fired, as a textbook example of how to screw up your life.

"New employee-put his dinner in the microwavehad foil in it-boom!" the manager says.

Abkhazia had been part of the Soviet wiffling Union. A new immigrant from Abkhazia trying to operate a microwave was like a deep-sea tube worm doing brain surgery. Where did they get these guys? Weren't there any Abkhazians who could bake a wiffling pizza?

Just give me one pie," the Deliverator says.

Talking about pies snaps the guy into the current century. He gets a grip. He slams the window shut, strangling the relentless keening of the smoke alarm.

A Nipponese robot arm shoves the pizza out and into the top slot. The hatch folds shut to protect it.

As the Deliverator is pulling out of the chute, building up speed, checking the address that is flashed across his windshield, deciding whether to turn right or left, it happens. His stereo cuts out again-on command of the onboard system. The cockpit lights go red. Red. A repetitive buzzer begins to sound. The LED readout on his windshield, which echoes the one on the pizza box, flashes up: 20:00.

They have just given the Deliverator a twenty minute-old pizza. He checks the address; it is twelve miles away.

 

 

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That's good news - I like it when someone actually takes the time to try to do something a bit more cerebral and stylish than your usual game show, reality nonesense or other such fly-on-the-wall tat.  I shall keep an open mind until I've seen it, although when that'll be is anyone's guess :)

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12 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

One positive thing that comparison with the graphic novel does confirm is just what a bloody marvellous job the film's production team did of capturing individual visual images (the frames of the graphic novel if you will), but somehow they lost the story along the way

 

and then some, I really didn't understand why  they changed what was Veidt/Ozmandias 'Gordian knot' solution  to something far more mundane...  I'm having difficulty remembering what it even was.

OK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen

hmm, seems that there are accusation s of Moore nabbing the idea off The Outer Limits.

Some interesting supplementary reading though,

 

the graphic novel is really something,   and much of it had a very film like quality,  which is why they filmakers were able to directly copy images.   Though why they changed the major plot device puzzles me,   I'll have a look at the wiki on the film.

 

final thought, Anyone ever notice the similarity of scene in Frozen where the ice castle is made to the sequence on Mars when Manhattan makes his glass palace?   

go to 2.30

 

 

 

oh, this is the Serbian version,  Jelena Gavrilović  really belts this out,  if you want a mind shift on this,  turn it up pretend it's Laibach ;)

if that means nothing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laibach_(band)

 

there was an interesting documentary on the BBC about them playing a concert in North Korea recently, which was pretty  odd.....

 

 

My daughter's Frozen phase was very brief,  but I did find foreign language versions of Let It Go interesting,   which is why looked up the Serbian version,  last time I checked it was in 44 languages....

see here for it blending between 25.....

 

 

apologies to anyone who loathes this,    but if you don't,   or have a child who does like this,  try some of the foreign ones.    Note many have had to change lyrics to fit ie

Sad je Kraj = it's over now

 

Sorry for the digression,  hope it amuses some here.

 

 

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5 hours ago, Troy Smith said:

Though why they changed the major plot device puzzles me,   I'll have a look at the wiki on the film.

I'd guess the complexity of writing the 'Island' subplot into the script, they took the news stand 'Pirate Comic' scenes out completely too, IIRC these are a major device in relation to this subplot.

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30 minutes ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

they took the news stand 'Pirate Comic' scenes out completely too, IIRC these are a major device in relation to this subplot.

They released that as a separate DVD... I know because I have it, but I haven't watched it yet :blush:

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If you aren't interested in reading the book, may I suggest the motion comic? I think it  is all available on YouTube. 

 

 

It's the orginal artwork narrated. It was all the rage a few years ago. 

 

I don't understand all the hate the movie got. I thought it was pretty good all things considered. I would have liked for them to include everything,  but I also don't want to sit thru a 5 hour movie either. 

 

I count Watchman with Infernal Affairs, it's one of the few times that Hollywood actually improved the ending. IMHO.

 

Y'all excited for the HBO series?  After Westworld, I'm game.

Edited by Thud4444
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I don't hate the movie, I accept it for what it is, a beautiful film that perfectly resembles Watchmen at the visual level, less so at the plot level.  ;)

 

15 hours ago, Pete in Lincs said:

I admit I didn't watch all of it, I wasn't sure what was going on!

Read the graphic novel, it will all become clear (it revolves around the artist of the pirate comic). 

 

Without the whole Island/Artist/Scientist subplot it is largely meaningless, not sure why they made the DVD version, it can't tie into the film as the central character (the artist) is utterly superfluous in the scenario presented there.

 

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I think the point that I've been struggling to make here is that the Watchmen graphic novel is a puzzle to be solved by the reader, it's almost interactive, the (depressing) Pirate Comic and the interactions at the news-stand where the kid reads it are critical to developing the various sub-plots of the story.....But the film doesn't even attampt to take that route, you just stare at it and go wow!  :o

 

PS - I just had to:

 

 

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I was in the Lincoln branch of W H Smith today.

They had one copy of Altered Carbon on the shelf.

I wonder if they'll need to get more in after the series starts?

 

Sarge, I see what you are saying (I think) but I'm not sure I could

be bothered to get that deeply into it. I've watched the film a couple

of times and enjoyed it for what it seemed to be to me, part time

superheroes and their faults. I probably missed some of the deeper stuff.

But I found it more believable than most of the DC type superheroes.

 

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I'm pleased that someone has taken on Altered Carbon for the screen, but I fear there's going to have to be a frightful amount of exposition involved to set the background to the story. That presumes the show follows the plot of the book, of course.

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