In the upcoming television show, a rich man 300 years in the future (played by Rome's James Purefoy) needs his own murder solved. So he resurrects and hires Takeshi Kovacs, a soldier killed in action 250 years previously, to investigate. The show looks impressively large, with stunning environments and sets. It's a serious throwback to the cyberpunk vision of novels like William Gibson's Neuromancer and, of course, Blade Runner, itself based on a Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Altered Carbon is set to debut on Netflix this Februrary 2nd.
Netflix has released a new, full-length trailer for its upcoming show Altered Carbon, a tech noir mystery about solving a murder in a world where death has lost all meaning.
Based off of Richard K. Morgan’s novel by the same name, Altered Carbon is set three centuries in the future, where people can transfer their consciousness from one body to another — if they can afford it. The trailer likens it to a person shedding their skin like a snake, allowing them to potentially live forever. Takeshi Kovacs (played by both Joel Kinnaman and Will Yun Lee) is a body-hopping soldier called an Envoy who is killed on a distant planet, but wakes up again 250 years later on Earth. He’s been resurrected by a wealthy man named Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) to investigate Bancroft’s own death.
We’ve seen a couple of short teasers for the show already, one that introduces the consciousness-transferring technology, while the other focused on the story’s unusual murder mystery. This new trailer for the show reveals just how big Netflix is taking the story. Not only does it have a complicated story, but it showcases a huge, futuristic world that evokes the cyberpunk aesthetics of Blade Runner.
The big-budget Altered Carbon seems riskier than some of Netflix’s past investments; Kinnaman has described the series as “a world that’s got a bigger budget than the first three seasons of Game of Thrones.” The streaming service is doubling down in hopes that it’ll become a prestige genre hit like HBO’s Game of Thrones or Westworld. Morgan’s novel has plenty of thematically similar material to work with — political intrigue, complex moral decisions, sex, and violence — but we’ll have to wait until the show’s debut on February 2nd to see how it measures up.
Netflix has released the first full trailer for its jaw-dropping sci-fi epic Altered Carbon.
The ambitious drama series is set 300 years in the future at a time when human consciousness can be digitally stored, allowing people to change and upgrade their bodies.
The series based on Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 cyberpunk novel stars a rather ripped Joel Kinnaman (The Killing, above) as an elite soldier with a tragic past assigned a new body in future San Francisco. The project is from writer-producer Laeta Kalogridis (Alita: Battle Angel, Shutter Island) with a pilot shot by Emmy-winning director Miguel Sapochnik (who helmed the “Battle of the Bastards” episode of Game of Thrones).
Check out our detailed walk-through of the Altered Carbon premise. Altered Carbon season 1 hits Netflix on Feb. 2.
