when to hit the mute switch

I restarted watching Altered Carbon after a gap to watch a couple of other shows. My head was telling me that this high budget sci-fi should really be my thing. This time there was a pleasant surprise, when, during one of the new episodes it almost felt as if the series had properly taken off.

All too suddenly it came crashing down again, with some complicated exposition which just didn't seem to work. Almost an inadvertent laugh out loud moment. I reached for the little button to tell me how far I was through the series. Okay, I let the next episode start automatically and suddenly realised I was on what seemed to be the wrap up of the original storyline. I'd tough it out to the end.

My guess is that the show was running behind schedule or something, because quite a lot of 'show don't tell' has been replaced with 'explain to static camera'. Sure, we get some Wachowski-like sequences, and lots of brooding camera angles, but I still couldn't properly engage with the lead characters. And then, after the main point had resolved, instead if it being the end, it juddered into a new story arc. I decided I've done enough miles and have moved along.

Contrast that with my next watch, which was Mute. That's another dystopian future - see the picture at the top of the post.

This is a 'find a missing person' noir and in this one they have actually dispensed with dialogue completely for the lead protagonist. Yep, he loses his voice in EXT. LAKE. right at the start of the show.

Netflix bothered to make a quite special placard advertisement for the movie, which also, to me, illustrates that, with a few exceptions, this could have been shot in a different era seedy Berlin.

Movieland must have huge stocks of spare dystopia, to make all these shows. This one riffs off of Berlin 2052, and being made by Duncan Jones (David Bowie's son), we get an almost entirely night-time Berlin. There's a main story and a fairly tangential secondary one, with a couple of jeopardised kooks running an sideline business.

Considering that this show has a mute lead character, I still found the characterisations more interesting than many of those in Altered Carbon, with some truly unhinged moments.

This gave the story some existential moments where the absurd and authentic collided. Like some kind of difficult self-assembly project, which parts would be left over at the end?

I could envisage at least a couple of different conclusions for this Saturday Morning picture and I suppose that is good, because at least it shows this one engaged me. That's in a way that the Altered Carbon series didn't, despite a much longer viewing.