This new series on the way to Netflix has a major bang of Blade Runner off it, but how bad.
Based on the classic cyberpunk noir novel by Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon is set 300 years in the future where the human mind can now be digitized and downloaded into a "cortical stack" and placed into new bodies called sleeves.
The ten-part series has some great talent on board too, with writer-producer Laeta Kalogridis (Alita: Battle Angel, Shutter Island) and Emmy-winning director Miguel Sapochnik, who helmed the Battle of the Bastards episode of Game of Thrones - which for our money, was the greatest episode of the entire show to date.
It follows the story of Takeshi Kovacs, the lone surviving soldier in a group of elite interstellar warriors who were defeated in an uprising against the new world order. His mind was imprisoned, "on ice", for centuries until Laurens Bancroft, an impossibly wealthy, long-lived man, offers Kovacs the chance to live again. In exchange, Kovacs has to solve a murder … that of Bancroft himself.
Speaking about the show, Kalogridis told EW, "It’s very different than what else is out in this space. There’s some Philip K. Dick in there, William Gibson, obviously Ridley Scott, and actually some Orson Welles and John Huston. We tried to imagine what a potential globalized future on Earth would look like, with a certain amount of technological change, a certain amount of technological familiarity and a very large degree of human familiarity."
Altered Carbon launches on Netflix Friday, February 2.
Take a look at the first trailer below: