He also enlists the help of the former soldier Vernon Elliot (Ato Essandoh), whose traumatized daughter Lizzie’s (Hayley Law) broken psyche is living in virtual reality, and an A.I. Kinnaman’s Kovacs smokes cigarettes and emits deadpan one-liners like a Scandinavian Bruce Willis while tangling with the salty Latina cop Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), who love-hates him. He tasks Kovacs, who has a special set of skills he developed while fighting as part of a failed revolution-I swear, I am trying to keep this concise-to find out. Laurens, with all his backups, is still alive and well but keen to know what happened.
Or rather, one of his sleeves has been murdered, taking with it the last 48 hours of his memory. Kovacs is resurrected into this world at the behest of the Meth Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who has been murdered. They rule the universe from abodes in the sky, wealthy, immortal, and, as the show points out, all but indistinguishable from gods, in the Greek mode: powerful, yes virtuous, no, no, no, no, no. The 1 percent, known as Meths-short for Methuselahs-have access to infinite sleeves, clones, and regular remote backups of their stacks.
The hoi polloi really die, or keep their stacks in limbo until their families can afford a new sleeve, while the rich live forever. It starts slowly-with narration and ultra-violence and nudity prestige snooze with sci-fi doohickeys-and it goes on way, way too long, but a couple episodes in, when I finally understood that the phrase “Re-sleeve your stack” was not describing something involving quarters and a dirty shirt, I realized I was into this ridiculous show.īodies are commodities and, as with all commodities, not everyone can afford them. Its concerns about tech, which are vast, come in Technicolor. 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. Instead, it heaps information and invention atop it: scads of William Gibson, mountains of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, dashes of Blade Runner, hints of The Matrix, Gaspar Noé visuals, Die Hard one-liners, Agatha Christie premises, Stormtrooper types, Hunger Games names, star-crossed lovers, star-crossed siblings, terrible Asian tattoos, silly mustaches, violence, penises, near-Tourettic cursing, interplanetary flashbacks. There is no way for Altered Carbon to get around the discomfort of its basic premise, and so it does not try. But in the midst of the Great Awokening it is not a great look, even though Kovacs and the body he’s inhabiting are both played by the swole Swede Joel Kinnaman, who has spent eons in the gym in order to look great.
In flashbacks, Kovacs is played by the Asian actor Will Yun Lee, and in future seasons the character may be played by a nonwhite actor. Altered Carbon is not Ghost in the Shell, the boondoggle of a film in which a (cybernetic) Asian character was played by Scarlett Johansson. “I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me,” Kovacs says in the book, after seeing his new visage for the first time. Morgan, in which an Asian man is stuck in the body of a white man and not happy about it. This is a particularly complicated version of whitewashing, the Hollywood habit of casting white actors in historically nonwhite roles, insofar as Altered Carbon is based on a novel by Richard K.
#Joel kinnaman altered carbon series#
Altered Carbon, a maximalist cyberpunk series arriving on Netflix this Friday, is the story of Takeshi Kovacs, a half-Japanese, half-Slavic fighting machine who, after being unconscious for 250 years-more on the logistics shortly-is revived in the body of a white cop.
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