Netflix’s Captain Laserhawk is a postmodern acid trip through Ubisoft history
As tremendous, and critically well received, as both of Netflix’s Castlevania series have been, you might expect the streamer’s newest video game adaptation from executive producer Adi Shankar to take a similar approach to translating iconic pieces of IP across mediums. But rather than simply staying true to its source material, or thoughtfully updating characters in ways that deepen their canons, Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remixbrilliantlystrips its source material for parts and fashions them into a postmodern multimedia experiment whose risky bets pay off big.
Though it’s very loosely based on Far Cry 3’s Blood Dragon standalone expansion from 2013, Netflix’s Captain Laserhawk series pulls from the lore of multiple Ubisoft video games like Watch Dogs, Rayman, and Rainbow Six Siege to tell a story about heroes rallying against an authoritarian power structure.
Set in a dystopian, cyberpunk reality where the United States has become a totalitarian technocracy known as Eden, the series revolves around Dolph Laserhawk (Nathaniel Curtis), a disgraced supersoldier turned criminal whose explosive heists make him one of the world’s most wanted men. As a cybernetically enhanced sharpshooter, steamrolling fleets of Eden’s police officers is light work for Laserhawk and his brick shithouse of a boyfriend, Alex Taylor (Boris Hiestand) — the protagonist of Ubisoft’s 2014 online racer The Crew.
It’s lethally embarrassing for Eden’s cops to be rendered helpless as Laserhawk robs the uber-wealthy in hopes of buying his and Alex’s way out of Eden for good. But when the boys’ final mission goes left, Laserhawk is unexpectedly disappeared to the Supermaxx governmental black site and conscripted into a Suicide Squad-style team of
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