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- Netflix
- Feb 2, 2018
- Netflix
- Feb 2, 2018
Summary The sci-fi series based on Richard K. Morgan's 2002 novel Carbon is set 300 years in the future where soldier Takeshi Kovacs (Will Yun Lee/Joel Kinnaman) awakens in a new body when he is freed from prison by Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who wants him to solve his murder.
Created By: Laeta Kalogridis
- Netflix
- Feb 2, 2018
- Netflix
- Feb 2, 2018
Summary The sci-fi series based on Richard K. Morgan's 2002 novel Carbon is set 300 years in the future where soldier Takeshi Kovacs (Will Yun Lee/Joel Kinnaman) awakens in a new body when he is freed from prison by Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who wants him to solve his murder.
Created By: Laeta Kalogridis
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Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 25 Critic Reviews
64
52% Positive
13 Reviews
13 Reviews
48% Mixed
12 Reviews
12 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 25 Critic Reviews
64
52% Positive
13 Reviews
13 Reviews
48% Mixed
12 Reviews
12 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Think of Altered Carbon as a cyberpunk “Game of Thrones,” except that winter is already here, three centuries into the future.
Altered Carbon is a complicated, intriguing, ultraviolent, sex-filled and compelling blast, a visual delight that periodically gets tripped up with its writing but never enough to detour the experience. Altered Carbon is flawed, but it's also fantastic. This is binge-ready sci-fi for the masses.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 695 User Ratings
8.0
80% Positive
555 Ratings
555 Ratings
12% Mixed
82 Ratings
82 Ratings
8% Negative
58 Ratings
58 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 695 User Ratings
8.0
80% Positive
555 Ratings
555 Ratings
12% Mixed
82 Ratings
82 Ratings
8% Negative
58 Ratings
58 Ratings
The sheer amount of imagining, both borrowed and original, accumulates into a vast, dirty world and gives Altered Carbon the feel of a proper cyberpunk novel: big, baggy, ambitious, trashy, funny, gruesome, clever, cheesy, and hyperactive. ... It ends with a saccharine but probably true lesson about life: It’s death that makes it meaningful. Altered Carbon is not the first, or 50th, work of fiction or philosophy to come to this conclusion, but it delivers its lesson with goofy verve to spare.
This show tackles race, gender, and class with all the subtlety of a blowtorch. (Also: There is a blowtorch.) I’m happy to live in a future where studios pay big money for sexy-violent meditations on the slippery state of humanity--and there’s a real promise for far-out further seasons--but right now Altered Carbon is all sleeve and no stack.
Every so often, Season 1’s disturbingly intense focus on flesh proves compelling, but Altered Carbon never fully comes to life.
Altered Carbon tries to meld a dystopian class-warfare story and a hard-boiled detective story by simply piling on both the pseudo-philosophical blather (much of it delivered in voice-over by Renée Elise Goldsberry as a rebel leader and Kovacs’s former lover) and the film-noir clichés. ... Mr. Kinnaman wears a bad attitude as easily as most actors wear a shirt, but playing a reluctant Philip Marlowe-style gumshoe with the soul of a freedom fighter (the embodiment of the show’s dual nature) doesn’t suit him, and he lacks his usual spark.
Netflix has taken more than a few flyers on big, splashy, time-wasting projects, and Altered Carbon -- a sci-fi experiment gone awry -- joins that pantheon of the quickly forgettable. Based on Richard K. Morgan's novel, the series looks great -- starting with Joel Kinnaman, who spends a lot of time showing off his commitment to the gym -- but in terms of substance, offers little more than an empty sleeve.
If you've read a book (like me), save time. Skydance made many changes in the story, adding a lot of cliches, empty dialogues, and cut out violent scenes and some important scenes, that they proppably dont understod it. But much of the story has remained and Joel Kinnaman is saving the result. If you don't know the book, be sure to try. Its still a good series (first one). If you are a book, you will most likely not like the result.
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SEASON 1
Amazing visuals, great world design which makes me want to read the novel to explore the world further. Mix of Blade Runner, Shadowrun universes with a touch of Matrix. Gratuitous nudity, violence and gore, almost as if the producers stole a side glance at HBO and thought "Viewers are really into nipples and human flaying".
The series is unfortunately let down by cheesy writing and characters. It's not even campy cheese, it's try-hard one-dimensional cheese. Some of the dialogue is corny and delivered with the finesse of a daytime soap opera. Poe the AI hotel is by far the most relateable and interesting character, who unfortunately is featured sparsely. Imagine if GoT made Tyrion Lannister a minor side character.
It's probably worth a watch, if only to feast on the visual design of the world.
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SEASON 1
I managed an episode and a half before being justifiably confused and disorientated by the convoluted plot elements and overwrought world building. Visually, this comes across as both very expensive yet equally uninspired, evoking a 90's attempt at a Blade Runner aesthetic, only with the added improvements of cutting edge CGI to maximise the gawky. Its the film every sci-fi director would've made in the 90's if they had unlimited cash - only it's 10 episodes long. It's influences are obvious too. I know nothing about the source material or when it was written but this is Demolition Man, with the disinterred release of a previous criminal to help solve a crime, the Hispanic female sidekick (with a scar on her eyelid) and the jabs at political correctness (no smoking etc). Only, this is too overblown and confused about its own identity to be as punchy and welcomingly ridiculous as Demolition Man, with its humour and tongue firmly in cheek. Okay, maybe it's a nod to fans of the genre, but that won't save this alone. The other obvious influence is Blade Runner, of course, with all its existential angst and blurring of the corporeal realm and the artificial. That's fine. But, this employs a direction overly fixated on body parts, breasts, asses, ****, flesh, to really feel any pathos for the characters. It's jarring. As a result, its full of emptiness and a kind of seasick pushing of sex and edginess that leaves me unsettled and categorically not entertained. This is a criticism of many tv shows in the modern era. The tv format is long and can be arduous if the material/characters aren't easy enough to spend a long time in the company of. A film, for me, would have been much better, and this typically noiresque storytelling isn't the kind of story that needs 10 hours to tell. Instead we get lots of irrelevent world building (as I've said) and the endless introduction of subtle features and detours to pad out the time. Yeah, amazing, hyper real, detailed environs and visual flares are great but it can also just feel like being sprayed down with LSD from a firehose when too much is fed to you. Lastly, what makes some films so timeless and beautiful is that we get a glimpse of a world long enough to understand the characters on screen. We can fill in the rest by inference through their emotions and a few striking visuals to feed from and create the rest in our heads. That's enough. This just falls flat despite all it's energy. I didn't understand all the subplots, whole sentences went over my head and many decisions by the characters seemed implausible or convenient. Anyway, the actors are very good, and the visuals are expertly rendered. If that's enough for you then fill your boots.
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SEASON 1
This show was not good! The plot was entirely convoluted; almost impossible to follow. Also pretty amateurish in a few ways. 1) Certain sets show the budgetary constraints, which I can forgive. 2) The acting!!! I can't understand how a show that has such talent behind the camera has such C-
performance in front of the camera. Watching Joel Kinnaman mumble his way through the script with all the liveliness **** ground sloth on Quaaludes is almost painful. How does this guy get work??? He has given exactly the same performance in every role since Robocop! I really wanted to like this show but with acting so sub-par it's extremely difficult to focus attention.
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SEASON 1
