Is Netflix's 'Altered Carbon' Any Good? Here's What The Reviews Say
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
[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.
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 objectification feels campy and clinical, like someone asked the makers of The Girlfriend Experience to reboot Wild Things.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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