And Martha Higareda turns in an impressive performance as Kristin Ortega, the local police officer charged with investigating Kovacs and his involvement with Bancroft, who soon becomes embroiled in the murder plot as every investigative thread intertwines with each other. We’re never sure if he is a good guy or a bad guy, but even in his good guy moments, we never really like him. James Purefoy is a perfect rich jerk as Laurens Bancroft. Kovacs wakes to a future that reviles his old life and belief system living among his enemies in a time so far removed from his own, his struggle becomes meaningless. He’s a Chandler-esque gumshoe, sniffing out double-crosses and trying to get to the bottom of a dense and multi-faceted investigation, while being simultaneously tortured by his past. He is a bewildered, tortured presence one that Kinnaman calibrates perfectly. On the acting front, Joel Kinnaman is excellent as Takeshi Kovacs (a character he shares, via flashback and memory, with Will Yun Lee, who is also great). Fans of grimy, seedy sci-fi will relish exploring all the details the world of Altered Carbon has to offer. Neon cityscapes stretch to the horizon and gaudy holographic adverts invade the senses. Visually, it’s not hard to see how Altered Carbon became one of Netflix’s most expensive shows, because despite the darkness and the shadow, it is dazzling. The universe Altered Carbon has created is vast and complex and bizarre. Superficially, Altered Carbon might invite those immediate Blade Runner comparisons, but once it unveils its intricate root system of a plot and leads you down a rabbit hole of conceptually challenging science fiction, the comparisons become unimportant. Blade Runner, like Star Wars and Dune, has left such a mark on the genre that it’s almost impossible to avoid its influence (directly or indirectly) in any post-82 dystopian sci-fi. However, that might really say more about how monumentally influential Ridley Scott’s classic is on the genre as a whole, than anything else. To get the similarities out of the way, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the influence of Blade Runner. And so sets in motion a murky, hard-boiled detective story that might owe a debt to Blade Runner and classic crime noir, but is also loaded to bursting point with its own fascinating ideas, beautiful design and existential turmoil. In exchange for Kovacs’ help, Bancroft promises to use his considerable influence to pardon him, which would allow Kovacs to live a normal life in his new sleeve. Having backed up his stack at the last minute, Bancroft managed to avoid a ‘real death’, but now he has the tricky problem of not knowing who wanted him dead. Bancroft asks Kovacs to solve his own murder. Waking up 200 years after an interplanetary civil war, in which he was on the losing side, Takeshi Kovacs (Will Yun Lin) finds himself in a brand new sleeve (Joel Kinnaman), with a proposition from prominent Meth Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy). This wealthiest one per cent – having cheated ‘real death’ for generations – are known as Meths, after the Bible’s oldest man, Methuselah. The technology, although available to all, is unsurprisingly controlled by the super-rich. If a person’s stack remains intact when they die, it is possible to place the stack in a new body, or “sleeve”, and for the person to carry on living with all the same memories, emotions and experiences. Acting as a sort of hard drive for the soul, the stack stores a person’s life, memory, and identity, collectively known as Digital Human Freight (DHF). In the distant future human beings are equipped with a device at the base of their skull known as a “stack”. But the gist of it, adapting Richard Morgan’s 2002 sci-fi opus into ten tasty increments, is thus… To try and concisely summarise the plot of Altered Carbon, Netflix’s latest big budget foray into your living room, would likely take as much space as the house brick of a novel on which it is based.
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