In the world of Altered Carbon, death is cheap. The human mind is digitized in a transferrable chip called a "stack," capable of being moved from body to body as necessary—or, if you've got the cash for it, as desired. Bodies have become increasingly uncoupled from the consciousnesses that occupy them. Slang now just calls them "sleeves." The future of Altered Carbon, Netflix's new science fiction series, is one the flesh is just another kind of economy.
A world like that has a lot of storytelling opportunities. Early in the first episode, in a drab, low-income facility for resleeving—the process of being resurrected in a new body—two parents are reunited with their murdered seven-year-old daughter. Only one problem: the girl is now in the body of a middle-aged woman. The victim's compensation program that allowed the parents to afford another body for their daughter wasn't discerning in what kind of body she received. We linger for a moment on the horror and outrage of the situation. A young girl in a body she's deeply unprepared for, with parents who have no recourse but to try to buy a sleeve they can't possibly afford, or put their daughter back to sleep.
Altered Carbon could use more moments like that, that deeply interrogate the setting, that push us as the viewers into considering the opportunities and terrors a future like that might hold. One of the principle values of science fiction is its ability to inspire reflection on a potential future—and, through that, the present we live in. Good science fiction is defined not just by its ability to entertain, but to provoke thought, to build and explore interesting ideas about technology, about our future. And too often, Altered Carbon doesn't have much of anything to say at all.
Netflix
The story, adapted from Richard Morgan’s 2002 novel of the same name, follows Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman and Will Yun Lee), once a supersoldier trained to stop the technocratic, immortality-worshipping regime that now rules human civilization. Kovacs has been dead for centuries, asleep in his stack, until Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), one of the oldest and richest men alive, resurrects him to solve the murder of Bancroft's last body. With a new stack and a new unasked-for purpose, Kovacs has to come to grips with the regime he tried to prevent and find a way forward in a world that's relegated everyone he ever loved to ancient history.
On paper, that struggle works. Unfortunately, Altered Carbon's protagonist is also its biggest problem. Kovacs—at least on screen—is a deeply uninteresting hero, and his story isn't a compelling means to enter this world. Kinnaman does a fine job playing the old warrior, and Wil Yun Lee (in flashbacks as pre-sleeved Kovacs) is stellar, but neither of them can solve the simple problem that Kovacs has almost no stake in the life he's been given. He's detached and bitter, and justifiably so, but his lack of interest in the world leads the show to feeling untethered, distant, and focused on all the wrong things.
Instead of an exploration of the complexities and terrors of Altered Carbon's reality, the show is basically a detective story. This isn't, in and of itself, a bad idea—neo-noir has always been a part of cyberpunk's sci-fi DNA, and the broad idea of an outsider taking a tour through a hostile world has a lot of potential. But the engines of the plot, focusing on Kovacs' place in the world and Bancroft's murder, pull the viewer away from the provocative questions that sleeves and stacks raise. To what lengths are the poor willing to go in order to get the bodies they want for themselves, or the people they love? What about, say, transgender people, who might find the opportunity to switch bodies a profound and essential liberation?
Netflix
Altered Carbon is aware of these questions, but they linger on the sidelines, away from the narrative, while Takeshi gets into another inevitable gunfight with mysterious assassins or spends another sexually ambiguous interlude with Bancroft's femme-fatale wife. The show picks up energy once it manages to shed some of the exposition that slows the first couple of episodes to a crawl, but it never manages to marry its plot with the bigger ideas lurking in the margins of its premise. One can imagine how, in the format of a novel, Altered Carbon could have its plot and eat it, too: following Kovacs through an ultraviolent, high-tech Raymond Chandler novel while letting the setting speak for itself in all its intrigue and mystery. The adaptation, though, chafes at its ten-episode constraints, and can't manage the balance.
Every distributor in television is looking for the next prestige genre hit. And a story like Altered Carbon has immense potential to be that show. Cyberpunk, as a specific subset of science fiction, is particularly well suited to our present cultural mindspace. Its focus on the implications of networked, digitized existence, dominated by technocratic regimes that merge economic and technological stratification, is more than a little relevant to where we've found ourselves in 2018.
But despite sporting the high production values necessary to bring a far-flung future to life, Altered Carbon isn't that prestige show. It's a generally interesting, if sometimes plodding, popcorn show with a few great ideas—it just may not be the cyberpunk you're looking for.
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Humanity has figured out a way to live virtually forever! Yay! But by doing so, it has sent society tumbling into a morass where issues of class, morality and wealth distribution have created a soul-sucking dystopia. Booooooo.
And when Netflix’s Altered Carbon reawakens a 22nd-century warrior centuries after his death and thrusts him into this terrible new world, things get even more complicated.
In a moment, we want to hear what you thought of the new sci-fi series, all 10 episodes of which began streaming Friday. But first, a brief recap:
Everything in the new series, based on Richard K. Morgan’s novel of the same name, centers on a specific piece of technology: A person’s consciousness is recorded in his or her “stack,” hardware installed near the base of the brain that can be removed after physical death and reinstalled in a new body (or, as the show calls it, “sleeve”). However, “If your stack is destroyed, you die,” a character warns near the top of the episode. “There’s no coming back from real death.”
Takeshi Kovacs (The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman) is the aforementioned warrior, one of a group known as Envoys, who opposed this artificial immortality and fought to end it. They lost. Kovacs was thrown in prison and his stack was deactivated… until a few hundred years later, which is when the series begins. Kovacs is reactivated at the behest of Laurens Bancroft (The Following‘s James Purefoy), an incredibly rich man who is one of the oldest men alive. Bancroft has a mystery that needs solving: Someone killed him — or, more accurately, destroyed his sleeve and trashed his stack — but he’s rich enough to have a complete backup beamed to a remote server thingy every so often. However, thanks to download/upload complications, Laurens can’t remember the identity of his assailant.
Laurens’ bargain appears simple at first: If Kovacs will solve the mystery, Laurens will buy his permanent freedom.
As you can imagine, having your consciousness plunked into a body that hasn’t been yours from birth is disorienting. (Indeed, we see Kovacs in his previous incarnation via flashbacks; later episodes show other versions.) Before Kovacs has even been in town a day, he takes a ton of drugs, has a drink with the angry detective who originally investigated Bancroft’s death (Martha Higareda, Royal Pains) and checks into a hotel run by an artificial intelligence calling itself Poe. That’s where he gets into a massive shootout with some thugs who show up and seem to want answers… though Kovacs isn’t sure why.
Lonely, high and with memories of a former love named Quell (One Life to Live‘s Renee Elise Goldsberry) flitting through his mind, Kovacs considers killing himself. But the vision of Quell that appears to him at his darkest moment urges him either to move on or “Do what you were born to do, what I trained you to do: Make things change.” And when he scoffs that saving an old rich guy won’t do much, she hints, “There’s more here than you’re willing to see.”
At the end of the hour, Kovacs calls Bancroft: “I’ll take the case.”
Now we want to know what you thought about Altered Carbon. Grade the series premiere via the poll below, then go to the comments to back up your pick!
Towers draped in neon. Artificial humans. Super-rich overlords. Rain. "Altered Carbon," debuting today on Netflix, has all of these cyberpunk tropes and more — but is it more than the sum of its familiar parts? Adapted from Richard K. Morgan's 2002 novel by writer Laeta Kalogridis, this 10-episode series certainly has the space to tell an interesting story. Does it? Here's what the reviews have to say:
There's Some Body-Swap Plot To Wrap Your Head Around
Humans have developed a small piece of tech called a “stack,” where their consciousness now resides. Bodies are “sleeves” that can be swapped out when the previous one ages and/or dies. Most people can’t afford high-end sleeves, so as always, it’s the wealthy who can essentially live forever, porting themselves into pricey clones that allow them not only immortality but also the same body and age in perpetuity, should they so choose.
[The A.V. Club]
This scenario is the backdrop for a mystery in which, given the new realities, the murder victim is still alive and curious about who killed him. Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), a powerful Meth, creates his own private eye by reviving the stack of a long dead Japanese-Slavic super-soldier, Takeshi Kovacs (Will Yun Lee), and putting it in the cybernetically enhanced, cryogenically preserved body of a recently dead Nordic policeman (Joel Kinnaman).
[The New York Times]
It Really Can Feel Like A 'Blade Runner' Rip-Off At Times
In the early going, this highly serialized tale, which is based on a novel by Richard Morgan, can come off as a bit too imitative of “Blade Runner”-esque projects and the film noir genre. Some of the cityscapes look like they came directly from the Ridley Scott classic, and on a narrative level, watching the first few installments of “Altered Carbon” feels like seeing several different scenarios from the Amazon anthology series “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams” play out at once.
[Variety]
By the time it indulges in a cover of White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human”—itself inspired by Blade Runner, and here remixed with the piano melody of John Carpenter’s theme from Halloween, which Rob Zombie remade—the series feels like a snake constantly eating its own tail, which, wouldn’t you know, is its signature credit-sequence image, with said serpent twisted into an infinity sign.
[The Daily Beast]
Joel Kinnaman Does A Fine Job Playing Takeshi Kovacs As A Classic Gumshoe
Kovacs, a former soldier with a murky past, is played by Joel Kinnaman, an actor capable of great subtlety and emotional transparency. For long stretches, however, “Altered Carbon” asks Kinnaman to stay in the slightly cynical, tough-guy mode recognizable from countless films about private detectives down on their luck. But when his Kovacs shows vulnerability or confused melancholy — and opportunities for that are too rare in the early going — the character and his plight become more engaging.
[Variety]
Kinnaman is excellent, selling all this ponderous silliness with the same easy charisma that saw him walk away with most installments of The Killing.
[The A.V. Club]
Weirdly, The Show Doesn't Have Much To Say About How The Protagonist's Race-Swap
Kinnaman plays Takeshi Kovacs, born to Japanese and Slavic parents (he's played by Will Yun Lee in flashbacks, where 250 years prior he was part of the uprising, a group called the Envoys).
[The Hollywood Reporter]
[This scenario] recalls the whitewashing controversy that plagued last year’s live-action Ghost in the Shell. No such outrage will likely greet Altered Carbon over this twist—both because the series is so thoroughly multicultural, and because Lee is given ample opportunities to shine. Still, one wishes Kalogridis exploited this central ethnic dynamic for more ruminative identity-pondering ends, rather than just as a super-cool storytelling device.
[The Daily Beast]
It Suffers From Ye Olde Netflix Story Drag
Like nearly every Netflix drama, it’s got more episodic sleeve than narrative stack: half the reason the story feels so exhaustingly convoluted is because Kalogridis and the other writers have more time to fill than the mystery can sustain, even as their curiosity about the world around the case ebbs and flows.
[UPROXX]
There's A Lot Of Nudity... Like, Too Much
Altered Carbon goes all-in on the nudity and fucking, with nearly episode featuring some form of explicit sexual activity. This hits its nadir early on, when an encounter between Takeshi and Bancroft’s wife (Kristen Lehman, doing her best femme fatale) goes from silly on every level—music, lighting, script—to almost pornographic. Those who admire Kinnaman’s physique will get to see a lot of it, but the constant nudity becomes downright distracting at times, and not in a good way.
[The A.V. Club]
The objectification feels campy and clinical, like someone asked the makers of The Girlfriend Experience to reboot Wild Things.
[Entertainment Weekly]
The dialogue is incredibly cheesy, and the porny-ness of it all so high, even Cinemax might roll eyes at some of it, particularly a fight scene where naked clones of one female character keep smashing through windows to fight one of the good guys. What’s meant to titillate instead becomes cringe-inducing as the clones run, jump, and even full body slide across a floor covered in shards of broken glass, never once troubled by it.
[UPROXX]
The Show Struggles To Balance All Its Story Elements
This had the ingredients to be an effective commentary on people and technology, but throwing the murder mystery into the mix overcomplicates things. Although the set-up is intriguing, writer Laeta Kalogridis struggles to balance the two threads alongside several other sub-plots, including historical uprisings, underground tech modification and a painfully predictable romance. There’s just too much going on.
[Empire]
Often, there are just too many ideas competing for attention, such that dialogue drowns in techno mumbo-jumbo and creative narrative twists turn out to be unnecessary detours. Aiming to be a cyberpunk The Big Sleep, it plays like a byzantine whodunit—replete with flashbacks, rewinds, animated interludes, and perfunctory hardboiled narration from Kinnaman—that’s bogged down by its own self-consciousness.
[The Daily Beast]
Characters deliver homilies on the evil wrought by the few having so much more than everyone else, then inexplicably pivot to explain why that means we have to get rid of the ability to take on new sleeves and continue living. Nobody’s asking the show to deliver a political manifesto; it’s just baffling that it adopts one, then contorts it into almost a non sequitur.
[The A.V. Club]
Still, There Are Some Worthy Instances Of Neat Sci-Fi And Badass Spectacle
Easily the strongest part of Altered Carbon is the construction and depiction of the world itself, so quickly conveying the nature and societal implications of stacks and sleeves that it’s able to make the miraculous feel like a simple fact of life, like an amusing subplot in one episode where Ortega resleeves her dead grandmother into the body of a tatted and pierced male criminal for the Day of the Dead; the grandmother seems less excited about being alive again than about the chance to pee standing up.
[UPROXX]
Later episodes also contain scenes of Renee Elise Goldsberry and Dichen Lachman kicking ass in several crackling action sequences, and it’s worth sticking out the slower sections of the season for those moments alone. When “Altered Carbon” is unafraid of embracing its the pulpiness at its core, it becomes both more enjoyable and more addictively textured.
[Variety]
Altered Carbon is often ridiculous, but damned if it isn’t the best-looking series Netflix has yet produced. The world of the show is a fully realized technological marvel, a society hundreds of years in the future that also looks like it. CGI spectacle suffuses nearly every frame of the series, making it compelling eye candy even—or especially—when the dialogue sinks like an overwrought lead balloon.
[The A.V. Club]
TL;DR
Altered Carbon is second-generation future noir, and its riffing on Blade Runner is, if inferior to Blade Runner 2049, nonetheless handled stylishly.
[The Daily Beast]
Watch The Trailer
ALTERED CARBON is set in a future where consciousness is digitized and stored in cortical stacks implanted in the spine, allowing humans to survive physical death by having their memories and consciousness "re-sleeved" into new bodies. The story follows specially trained "Envoy" soldier Takeshi Kovacs, who is downloaded from an off-world prison and into the body of a disgraced cop at the behest of Laurens Bancroft, a highly influential aristocrat. Bancroft was killed, and the last automatic backup of his stack was made hours before his death, leaving him with no memory of who killed him and why. While police ruled it a suicide, Bancroft is convinced he was murdered and wants Kovacs to find out the truth. Written by Anonymous
