With just a handful of weeks until the premiere of Altered Carbon, Netflix has released a full trailer for its adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s cyberpunk noir novel. In the trailer, soldier-turned-revolutionary Takeshi Kovacs is resurrected against his will, to solve the murder of a rich man, in a future where humans can transfer their consciousness between bodies, or “sleeves,” in order to attain immortality.
While the first teaser focused on fictional sleeve company Psychasec (who also shared some fun viral marketing at the Consumer Technology Association’s CES 2018), this trailer delves more into the unfamiliar world into which Kovacs has been reborn: lots of Blade Runner 2049-esque holograms, wealth and immortality going hand-in-hand, the interstellar warriors the Envoys… oh, and the threat from Kovacs’ employer: “If you don’t solve this quickly enough, I will erase you.” Welp.
The series’ official synopsis, from Netflix:
In the distant future, human consciousness can be digitized and downloaded into different bodies. Brought back to life after 250 years by Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) the richest man on Earth, ex-Envoy soldier Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman/Will Yun Lee) must solve Bancroft’s attempted murder for the chance to live again in a world he doesn’t recognize.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhFM8akm9a4
Altered Carbon season 1 drops February 2 on Netflix.
Good to see that Dichen Lachman is still acting. I’d lost track of her after Dollhouse.
@1/Landis963: Oh, Dichen Lachman’s done a ton of stuff since Dollhouse, including a regular part on ABC’s short-lived Last Resort and recurring roles on the Syfy Being Human, The 100, Agents of SHIELD, and Supergirl (well, twice so far). She also had a one-episode guest spot on Torchwood: Miracle Day not long after Dollhouse, and played herself in an episode of Felicia Day’s webseries The Guild. She’s a pretty popular actress these days, especially in genre shows.
Personally, I’d be happier if Will Yun Lee were playing the “after” version of the character instead of the “before” version, who probably will not be seen that often. Not only would that avoid one more case of Hollywood whitewashing an Asian role, but I just find Lee a more interesting actor than Joel Kinnaman. (And yes, I gather that the show is following the novel in that respect, but adaptations often change characters’ ethnicity.)
Will be interesting to see what happens if they move the adaptation to books 2 & 3 — technically, they don’t need to have any recurring cast members; in fact, if I remember correctly, each book should have an entirely different cast.
Personally, I’d be happier if Will Yun Lee were playing the “after” version of the character instead of the “before” version, who probably will not be seen that often. Not only would that avoid one more case of Hollywood whitewashing an Asian role
But a key plot element in the original book (which you should read, it’s pretty good) is that Kovacs is not in his original body, but in a white body, and feels uncomfortable about it. You’re effectively suggesting casting Will Yun Lee as someone called “Elias Ryker” (Kovacs’ body’s original owner).
It’s also not made clear what Kovacs’ original body’s appearance was. He has a Japanese first name and Hungarian surname, but that doesn’t mean he’s Asian or even mixed-race – he was born on a world whose culture had lots of Japanese elements, so having a Japanese first name might simply reflect that. Much as a lot of Asian people have Anglo first names…
technically, they don’t need to have any recurring cast members; in fact, if I remember correctly, each book should have an entirely different cast.
Yes. In the second book, pretty much every main character is Maori in appearance. Or, as Hollywood pronounces it, “Indian with fake tattoos drawn on.”
@4/ajay: “But a key plot element in the original book (which you should read, it’s pretty good) is that Kovacs is not in his original body, but in a white body, and feels uncomfortable about it.”
Okay, if the show actually confronts the racial issue, that would help, but in practical terms it’s still putting yet one more boring white male in the highest-paying, starring role and relegating an Asian actor to a lower-paying, lower-profile supporting role. No matter how good the excuse for that may be in any individual work, the problem is that Hollywood does it every single goddamn time, adding up to a systematic pattern of racial discrimination in hiring. People who defend this sort of thing purely in terms of internal story and character logic are forgetting that this isn’t about abstract characters and imaginary worlds, it’s about real live, working Asian-American actors getting routinely shut out of starring roles.
“You’re effectively suggesting casting Will Yun Lee as someone called “Elias Ryker” (Kovacs’ body’s original owner).”
First off, no, because adaptations often change character names, sometimes to suit the actor (for instance, Quail becoming Quaid in Total Recall) and sometimes for legal reasons (for instance, the TV series The Dresden Files turned Detective Karrin Murphy from the books into Constanza Murphy because there was a real Chicago cop named Karen Murphy).
Second, it’s not at all uncommon for Asian-Americans to have Westernized names, either by birth or adopted for convenience. Kristin Kreuk is a Chinese-American actress with a Dutch surname, and she’s played characters named Lana Lang (which could easily have been a Chinese surname, but clearly wasn’t in the show’s context) and Catherine Chandler. Agents of SHIELD‘s Chloe Bennet (nee Wang) plays a character named Daisy Johnson, and the same show’s Ming-Na Wen plays Melinda May.
“In the second book, pretty much every main character is Maori in appearance. Or, as Hollywood pronounces it, “Indian with fake tattoos drawn on.””
There are a number of Maori or part-Maori actors in the business today, including Manu Bennett, Cliff Curtis, Temueira Morrison, Jemaine Clement, and Keisha Castle-Hughes.
@5. I’m in favor of putting Manu Bennett in everything, so I’m cool with it.
5.last: Yeah and last time there was an SF film with a major character who was Maori they didn’t cast any of those, they cast Ben Kingsley with fake tattoos drawn on.
As for the rest – No. I don’t think that every time Hollywood casts a white guy as a white guy, you are out protesting that they didn’t rewrite the story to make the character Asian so they could cast an Asian guy. I think you haven’t read the book, you jumped to conclusions based on the character name in a story you know nothing about, and now you are blowing smoke.
Please keep the tone of the discussion civil–the full Moderation Policy can be found here.
@7/ajay: As I said before, it’s not about any single work, it’s about the aggregate pattern. Every time Hollywood whitewashes an Asian lead, they have a reasonable-sounding excuse for it (well, usually), but the problem is that it keeps happening virtually every time. I’d just like to see the occasional case where it doesn’t happen, but they keep failing to materialize. The only recent movie adaptation I can think of that cast an Asian lead actor to play an originally Asian lead character was Big Hero 6, and even that changed the Japanese lead to a biracial Japanese-American lead. I guess you could also count that recent Bruce Lee biopic Birth of the Dragon, but that’s based on a real person rather than a fictional character, so it would’ve been hard to whitewash.
But it’s rather difficult to “whitewash” a character that was white in the first place and that plays a rather major part of the story (normally you’re not put in a body with a criminal history, but Kovacs is because his employer is a bit of a git and that causes immense problems for him).
If a character’s ethnicity has no bearing on the story then there’s nothing particularly lost by changing it, but that is very much not the case in this story.
@10: See my response in comment #9.
Here’s an io9 interview with the showrunner that eases my concerns about the casting issue:
https://io9.gizmodo.com/how-altered-carbon-handles-its-unique-whitewashing-issu-1821552497
Sounds like they’re making a real effort not to erase Kovacs’s Asian identity, maybe even to make this a sort of allegorical critique of whitewashing. And the door’s hypothetically open for an Asian actor to take over as the lead in the future, since characters can change bodies so easily. That’s a step in the right direction for Hollywood.
So is there going to be an article on the series anytime?
Ok, I’ve watched S2. Can’t say I it was more than ok. Where S1 had to modify the book, I was fine with the changes and actually thought they improved things by simplifying. S2 doesn’t have much in common with the book except the name. I found it kind of disappointing.
Gah. “Can’t say I thought it was more than ok.”