Yup. It's not an isolated thing. New York City has trademarks on its services and city skyline, so do the USMC (the planet and anchor and the initialism (USMC) are both protected devices). Although Apple just lose a case to some Italian men who managed to snag the trademark for "Steve Jobs" ...
That would be the EAG (Eagle, Anchor, Globe). That's what it's called and they put it on literally everything (been there, done that ~ish). Also, NYC having the trademark on their skyline amuses the shit out of me. I'm waiting for someone to fight that with a photograph that was taken as opposed to a design that was made.
In the future there is only night. And walls that go boom. *wink* Wait, the bags have different Best Before and too short for jail terms I remember from book? And you can get one with pistol? Hollyweird... *rolleyes*
Kovacs will be seen in two "sleeves", also. "Birth" Kovacs, played by Will Yun Lee (since he is supposed to be of Eurasian appearance as befits the Hungarian/Japanese blend of his homeworld). and the one he's decanted into by Bancroft - played by Joel Kinnaman. My hope is they add the third sleeve, where he duplicates himself to finish the job (violating quite a few UN laws in the process - double-sleeving is a stack-erasure offence by itself).
Spoiler: Spoilers serie!! Dude, use the Spoilers code for those things, or you might suffer a "superspoiler attack" from those of us who have read the whole series :p
It's been over 15 years since the book was published. Well past the need for "spoilers". It's not like it will be the ONLY time he does it, either. :D Do I need to put spoiler tags around the ending to "lord of the rings" or "gone with the wind", too?
Well, there will be a lot of people who never heard of the books, but will now with the series! I was one of those back with American Gods (but I read the novel, and I still have to see the TV series XD), so... No, not for Lord of the Rings now. But back in the day when they were being filmed and on the cinemas? Yep, even if the books were nearly 50 years old :p
I fell asleep through all three lotr movies in the cinema. So I counted on those spoilers to tell me what I'd slept through. :D Managed to sleep from about 20-odd minutes in through all of the (from what I'm told) VERY LOUD battle scenes only to wake mid-credits - but the books also bored me to tears, so I knew going into them that I wasn't going to stay awake. I've never cared much for spoiler warnings.
So, initial thoughts anyone? I'll share mine. Not finished with it but it gets a meh from me. The changed character motivations and background (character and universe) details weren't needed. I give the acting a B-. The secondary characters are better acted then the main characters are the majority of the time. Dialogue ranges from okay to cheesy. Also, the Josh Whedon-esc quips got annoying after a while. Production design is great as are the fights but they don't make up for the rest of the series short falls.
I'll give it a pass - a solid B- Close *enough* to the book without being slavish - even including the changes to characters, motivations and factions. Better than "Starship troopers", worse than "Christine" (in book to video transfer).
So far (just finished episode 2, about to start 3), I am enjoying it. Visually, it is delicious. The story hasn't grabbed me yet, but it feels very noir/hardboiled, so I'm not expecting to be grabbed so much as to sink into it. I'm enjoying it. Also, it gives me a lot of the Infinity vibes (obviously), which is fun. Worth noting, I haven't read the books, but had added them to my list. I didn't know it was going to be a series until this thread was started, so now I'm going to read the books after finishing the series and then deciding, in retrospect, how to feel about the show. I'm not expecting to hate it, though.
Be warned that the books are more... detailed in the "mindfuckery" (so to speak...and sorry for my chinese XD). Also, each book takes on a different planet and a different situation... But all have their share of Nightmare Fuel: Book 1 is Old Earth, starts a lot like a Cyberpunk-esque (kinda like Shadowrun, without magic/exotic races) style, then welcome to Earth, investigate this, get a big tour on the "setting". It's the best because of the familiarity with the dissonance. Book 2 is Kovacs as war advisor to a mercenary army payed by the corporations to pacify a situation in a planet (to avoid reaching a point where Envoys are sent by the U.N.), but the war is more of a background situation than anything else. You can split this book into 3 parts: recruiting a team, archeology expedition with a threat quite close, and finally into the belly of the beast. Book 3 is in Kovacs' home planet. We get to see all that Quellcrist Falconer "babbling" firsthand, meet some old acquitances of a vengeance-driven Kovacs, we see some impact from the last book's conclusion (mostly tech improvements, which is kinda surprising since these series tend to follow the Star Trek trend of "performance improvements, but rarely anything new/different"), and the Jethro/twin plot somewhere there. It's a little more light than the first, but heavier than the other two in other aspects. Overall, I'd say that the three books cover different areas, all of them in a good enough or better level, with the only "repetitive" thing being Kovacs as "I know exactly how to do this", which is his shtick (envoy training, essentially).
I've seen the whole series now on Netflixes. Overall I give it a b+. I think anybody who enjoys Infinity/Sci-Fi in a gritty universe will enjoy it. I think the setting was amazingly well done. I enjoyed the characters, and felt the acting was pretty good. I found that it tended to drag a bit towards the end, which is pretty common for Netflix series. Felt like they had to fill X episodes, while they were 1-2 short of that actual number. *Minor Spoiler* This includes an entire episode with the Envoys, exploring Taka's past. Seemed a bit too much to me.*Minor Spoiler* I also had some problems with the main villain's motivations, seemed a bit extreme to me, and the pacing probably didn't help that much. I also noted that the further along it got, the more it deviated from the books. I feel the TV show softened the main character a bit in a way the books did not. He's still the same character, but he seems far more attached to the other characters. In the book, the main character is also caring, but not overly so. There are times when he attempts to keep people from getting hurt, but he doesn't go to the same lengths as he does in the TV show. In the book, people are largely expendable. Personally I like the TV version of Taka a bit more, but I also like selfless heroes who do things for the right reasons. (Which isn't quite what Taka is in either version)
I've watched the first episode and a bit of the second and have been thoroughly enjoying it so far. I haven't read the books (though they are on my to-read list now), so I guess I haven't got the comparison to see where the adaptation has changed things. Most hilarious thing I've read though is creator has been accused of GitS-style whitewashing by casting 'a person who identifies as Japanese with a white actor'. Despite even the wikipedia article on the book series pointing out that: Kovacs, killed in the novel's prologue and stored in digital form, is downloaded into a sleeve formerly inhabited by Bay City (formerly San Francisco) policeman Elias Ryker http://metro.co.uk/2018/01/30/joel-...shing-claims-netflixs-altered-carbon-7274006/
I agree with Kinnamen, seems lazy and silly, considering the Japanese sleeve comes back in flashbacks. It's been a while since I read the books, but ethnicity/racism didn't seem like a thing in the universe, and I never really payed much attention to the various "sleeves" the character inhabits. Further the character himself doesn't seem to care about his sleeve, or the ethnicity of the people around him. Seems like they spend more time thinking about the implications about "cross-sleeved" people, which is to say people of one sex in the body of another. This happens several times in the books/TV show and are used to discuss identity with regard to a person's body vs who they are mentally. **Minor Spoiler**There's also a scene with a 7 year old girl stuck in a very old person's body. This also seems to focus on identity questions, rather than agism.**Minor Spoiler**
I love how it's a setting where race and gender are as irrelevant as what an ant's opinion of your underwear could be, but we still need to make it about race and gender politics.
