W00t! Reviewing two things that came out just this year, and it's only February! I am on the cutting EDGE of movie critiqueing! Sure, about 50 other reviewers already reviewed the Netflix series and the movie that came out right after the superbowl, but fuck them! I'm old, and have chronic pain and depression, so shit takes me a few days, okay? Fuckin nags. I'm going to review Altered Carbon first, because it came out last week friday, before the Cloverfield movie. Plus, it was just a wee bit better.
Altered Carbon (2018, fuck yeah, bitches!) is about a soldier called back from the dead after 250 years by a technology called Altered Carbon that allows people to live more than one life, sometimes in another body, by storing and transferring a person's consciousness, memories and life experiences in something called a "stack" (which is implanted into the spine like a substitute disc). Takeshi Kovacs served 250 years dead (which also serves as a prison, apparently) for terrorism, but now he's being tasked with solving the "temporary" murder of his new boss, what they call a "Meth." A "Meth" is short for "Methuselah," basically a rich person who uses their great wealth to buy themselves extra "sleeves" (bodies) so that they can live out many lifetimes, instead of the poor folks who still typically die after living just one or two lifetimes. Trouble is, Takeshi died fighting for an end to the whole concept of living more than one life, and now has to come to terms with working for the very kind of man he died fighting against. Along the way, Takeshi's past comes back to haunt him, in more ways than one. Can Takeshi solve the riddle of the Meth's temporary murder before it's too late, or will he just say "Fuck it!" and go back to the prison of eternal death?
Altered Carbon stars Joel Kinnaman as Takeshi Kovacs, which might be considered white-washing by some folks, but in a world where everyone switches bodies at the drop of a hat, it's hard to tell who's who anymore. James Purefoy is Laurens Bancroft, the "Meth" who thaws Takeshi out of cold storage. There's a good supporting cast, although the only one I actually recognized from other things is Hiro Kanegawa, who plays Captain Tanaka. The acting is decent, and the special effects were good, but mostly, Altered Carbon leaves me with lots of questions. Perhaps some minor spoilers to follow.
How is being dead defined as "prison time" if you're actually dead, and don't notice any time passing? Doesn't that mean poor folks go to prison forever just by being too poor to afford a new "sleeve (new body)?" If people can be reincarnated into new bodies, or even their old bodies after the bodies have been repaired, then why does anyone need to pay for being reincarnated into a new body, when their old bodies can just be fixed? If the "Envoys" were the greatest fighting force in the galaxy, how did they get slaughtered by a bunch of Protectorate soldiers in their first and only battle? If the big thing about being an Envoy was being able to overcome "sleeve-sickness" right away, then how does Ortega's grandmother get over her sickness and start playing with her grandkids in the time it takes Ortega to walk home from work? How is it the Envoys live in a forest in a cave with a tree growing in it and eat on wooden tables, but somehow managed to build a sophisitcated "needle-casting" setup all the way out in the boondocks without alerting anyone else on the planet? How did the Protectorate manage to focus the direct-download "Rawlins virus" without actually knowing where the Envoys were? How did Reileen manage to get away and tip off CTAC, when Quell mounted a rescue mission just to rescue Takeshi so he wouldn't give away the plan? How is it the thug that inhabits Takeshi's cloned body is able to move around like a ninja, when the thug was just a big dumb bruiser in his old body?
How is it that in all their exploring, human beings never found anything alien except the "songspire" trees, and some Virtual-reality torture-worms? How is it the Neo-Catholics can object to using "alien technology" (paraphrasing Ortega's mom) to live multiple lives, when the technology was actually invented by humans? How does inventing "Altered Carbon" help the "explorer" who invented it to explore, when you need a "stacked" body (no, not a body with big breasts, I mean a body that has an Altered-Carbon-stack in the spine that allows it to back up the body's memories) to needlecast into, just to get to another planet? What's the point of having a satellite to backup your memories into, if needlecasting is actually faster than light? If it's not faster than light, wouldn't it take years and years to needle-cast between planets? Doesn't the technology have to be carried to a planet before people can start needlecasting onto it? If the technology to exist for more than one lifetime is so expensive, doesn't that mean those living outside of a major city, or on undeveloped planets, don't have access to it? Wouldn't that also mean that the only "exploring" the "explorer" could do, would be exploring major, already-well-established cities?
And that's just the questions off the top of my head. I think I avoided any major spoilers with my questions up there, but who knows? I am familiar with the term "suspension of disbelief," but when the series contradicts itself and its own introduced technology, am I supposed to cast aside what was set forth in the last episode just because the latest episode introduces new information? (shrug) On the plus side, Altered Carbon has lots of fighting and nudity in every episode, which is great. I read an interview with Dichen Lachman about her nude sword-fighting scene in the series, and I think it's awesome she feels empowered by it. Just that aspect of the series alone gives me reason to suggest you go watch it on Netflix, but was I bowled over by the series? Did I find it the next "Blade Runner?" No, but I wasn't that impressed with Blade Runner, either. I don't automatically associate every sci-fi movie movie I watch with Blade Runner, but that's just me. I watch a lot of horror and sci-fi, and I tend to think of each offering as it's own unique presentation, without trying to compare it to other things. Still, if you like watching gun battles and sword fighting and naked peeps (without looking too closely at the plot or technical aspects), you could do worse than Altered Carbon.
On to the next review! The Cloverfield Paradox (2018, double-yeah, bitches!) was apparently something Paramount sold to Netflix at a discount, which Netflix decided to slap their name on and vomit up onto their service as quickly as they possibly could. Short summary, the entire Earth is in despair over a lack of renewable energy (not sure what happened to solar and wind power?), but somehow, humankind still managed to build a gigantic particle accelerator in space to explore the atom-smashing options to create unlimited energy. Unfortunately, when the team finally succeeds in their mission, ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE! Yes! I haven't said that since October! Wheeee! :-D
There was a buttload of awesome actors and actresses in The Cloverfield Paradox (also called the God Particle, presumably before the Cloverfield folks got their hands on this movie and made it even worse), but the acting isn't what brings this movie down. This thing starts out so slow I thought I was going to doze off before anything happened, and then when it did, the addition of the Cloverfield mythology only made this movie into a clunky mess. The events going on at the space station could, by themselves, have been woven into a decent horror flick, much like the "Life" movie last year or the year before, with a similar concept. The whole side-plot of the woman trying to get back to her husband could have been completely left out, and the movie would have been better for it. In fact, all the scenes that involved what was happening on Earth, especially the Cloverfield-inspired scenes that seem tacked on willy-nilly, could have been left out. It might have made the movie a decent horror flick, but in the end, it was just a mess. I was left feeling like the one man's severed arm, somehow still alive and intact, sitting in a glass jar and tapping its fingers impatiently, probably waiting for the movie to finally end. And, when they go out of their way to say that they can't fire the particle accelerator without the station engineer, how tf did they just go ahead and fire it up without the engineer anyways? Makes no goddamn sense. Someone needs to take that severed zombie arm and bitch-slap the producers with it. Wtf is wrong with you guys?
You know, there was an old position that was listed in the credits in a lot of the older movies, called "Continuity." Continuity is short for "making sure the fucking movie makes sense," and it's a position that seems to have been cut from any of the more recent stories I've seen in the last, oh, 20 to 25 years or so. Does anyone even watch these things after they make them, to make sure they turned out okay? Or does the director just finish filming, have a wrap party, and toss the rolls of film at the editing department, who then edits the thing while still hung over? I can't say. I'm not in the film industry. But damn, seems like there's a distinct lack of common sense out there nowadays.
I can't recommend "The Cloverfield Paradox" (or "The God Particle") to anyone, mostly because the movie pretty much sucked. If you haven't seen it, don't. And honestly, the next time I see a title with anything "Cloverfield" in it, especially given that the movies involved don't seem to have a goddamned thing to do with the original "Cloverfield" movie (that I didn't really find all that awesome to start with), I think I'm just going to take a pass on it, and go watch something else. To me, "Cloverfield" is short for "senseless piece of crap with a monster that only shows up at the end for no discernable reason."
That's all for tonight. Join me again this weekend, when I finally get to see Wonder Woman on HBO for the first time (hey, I don't go to the theaters, ok?), and I'll try and get the review out before the end of the month. Did I mention I am old and slow? :-/
No comments:
Post a Comment