In other words, Altered Carbon promises something ambitious right off the bat. It’s a fast-paced premiere, one that presents the basic tenets of this world along with some very impressive visuals, while not skimping on the “look, we’re not on network TV!” levels of nudity and violence.
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This is Netflix throwing its weight into action-heavy, high-budget TV sci-fi, anchored by another solid performance from The Killing’s Joel Kinnaman and an intriguing mystery at its center. Dick, Ridley Scott, and the Wachowskis, but pulling primarily from the novel of the same name by Richard K.
After spending 250 years with his consciousness filed away in a digital prison’s trash folder, Kovacs is abruptly decanted into a taut new body and tasked with solving the murder of the world’s richest man.Altered Carbon plunges us into a pseudo-philosophical, cyberpunk vision of the future, one clearly inspired by the work of Philip K. Instead, what impresses is the ingenuity with which humans continue to pervert sleeve technology to their own ends, for personal gain or transgressive sexual gratification.įor Kovacs, a convicted war criminal turned prickly sleuth (played, mostly, by recent Robocop Joel Kinnaman), this tech also offers a chance at parole. It is a marvel so commonplace that it is seen as banal. In Altered Carbon’s far-flung future of 2384, this tech has already been around for more than two centuries. Or you could take someone else’s body for a test-drive: a bodybuilder, a dancer, maybe even a significant other. This could be a perfect clone of your younger self, the first step in a daisy-chain to immortality. Die and you can simply be restored from your most recent cloud backup, your identity squirted back into a new “sleeve”. For decades, humans have had the ability to digitise their consciousness. It does, at least, have an additional gimmick. Restaging such familiar material almost feels ritualistic, as if to summon memories of Ridley Scott’s future-noir But in its own neon-soaked, techno-addled, C-word-dropping way, Altered Carbon initially feels rather cosy, like Downton. True to the source material, Altered Carbon takes pains to position itself as hardboiled entertainment, with lurid firearm ultraviolence, chemically enhanced sex and cynical tough-guy narration from its diamond-hard lead, Takeshi Kovacs. Via movies, animation and video games, cyberpunk has become so shopworn that it has become essentially a nostalgic period setting. Restaging such familiar material almost feels ritualistic, as if to intentionally summon fond memories of Ridley Scott’s deathless future-noir or its monumental 2017 sequel.Īs cultural consumers, we have been bombarded with variations of this future on and off for more than 25 years. So it’s a little disappointing that Altered Carbon – Netflix’s luxurious 10-part adaptation of Richard K Morgan’s 2002 sci-fi novel – serves up all of these totemic scenes within its first two episodes. These vignettes might sound a little familiar, either as deliberate echoes of Blade Runner or examples plucked from a one-size-fits-all generic cyberpunk techno-dystopia. In a darkened refuge, an investigator scrolls through footage vital to his big case, verbally instructing a computer to freeze and enhance where required. Far below, a multicultural throng jostles past exotic bazaars and hologram-enhanced fleshpots. A flying cop car knifes through a benighted cityscape glinting with gaudy neon enticements. San Francisco, say, in the 24th century: a depraved new world, but one stacked precariously on the old.
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