Captain Laserhawk’s Adi Shankar on multiverses, AI, and Rayman propaganda

08.11.2023 - 16:23 / theverge.com / Ai

There’s a chaotic, disorienting quality to many of Adi Shankar’s short films and series like Netflix’s first Castlevania that makes it seem as if the writer / director / producer always wants his stories to leave you winded and a bit rattled. His Konami-approved take on Dracula came with the brand name recognition and exquisite action sequences evocative of the classic games, but in Castlevania, you could still see shades of the high-energy, low-budget Bootleg Universe that first put Shankar on the map. This is even more true of Shankar’s latest series for Netflix, Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix.

Castlevania was Shankar’s idea of the second generation of video game adaptations — a relatively straightforward translation of characters and stories from one medium to another connected by a shared universe. But with Captain Laserhawk — a dystopian action / adventure that incorporates reimagined versions of multiple Konami video game characters — Shankar spells out much of what he sees as his vision for the next wave of games turned into shows and movies.

Rather than letting itself be boxed in by the original canons of its heroes and villains, Captain Laserhawk breaks them down, distills them into their most essential parts, and remixes them into something radically new but undeniably familiar. Case in point: the new show’s big nod to Assassin’s Creed comes in the form of a French anthropomorphic frog, and Rayman features as a coked-out mouthpiece of an authoritarian state who reads propaganda on the news every night. That kind of wild experimentation with established canon is precisely the kind of thing that usually sets fans — particularly video game fans — on edge for fear that their faves might look and sound different than they used to.

When we spoke with Shankar recently, he explained that while Ubisoft’s having his back from day one assuaged many of his concerns about the process of making Laserhawk, he knew that viewers coming to the show from the games might need some convincing. It’s a challenge Shankar was more than ready to take on, he said, because as batshit and chaotic as the world of Laserhawk might seem to us, in his head, it’s a living, breathing place that all makes a perfect, organic kind of sense.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

When people first got a look at Laserhawk and the way it plays and screws around with Ubisoft’s IP, there was this assumption that you had to do a lot of convincing to get the studio to understand your vision, but you’ve spoken about how they’re really on board with the story as you conceived it. How did that support shape your sense of how much risk you were able to take with the series?

You know, at the end of the day, the vision