Altered Carbon

I’m hip; I’m cool.  I can react to current trends with this blog, rather than just running through things I liked on the telly when I was 12 years old.   A few weeks ago, my Facebook feed was awash with people talking about Altered Carbon.  And by awash, I mean there were about two posts from friends I suspect to be fans of this sort of science fiction thing anyway.  Nevertheless, the show was unavoidable on Netflix for more or less a whole evening and I weakly succumbed to the power of suggestion and clicked play on the first episode.  I’d get through the ten-part series in no time at all and crack out the freshest post this blog has ever seen.

Weeks later, I’ve only just limped to the end of it.  I didn’t like it.  Critics of this blog (and most of you only say nice things (or point out my typos with a glee that can only be built up from years of me criticising every apostrophe misuse you have ever committed)) will note with rolling eyes that I seem to like most of the things I write about.  That’s why I write about them: to share them (and my opinions; oh, and to seek attention).  But I hated Altered Carbon.

I don’t say this lightly.  I wanted to love it.  On paper, it’s 100% my type.  I love zombies.  I love high schools.  I love a period drama.  But, I also love dystopian futures.  It looked slick and stylish and I had naively begun to think that Netflix only greenlights top-notch entertainment.  So gather round everyone, while I, with all my experience of working in an office, take you through my subjective ranting.

So why’s it called Altered Carbon?  I literally don’t know.  I’m also not going to Google it as I’m not really interested.  Next we must ask what it’s about.  Altered Carbon is a series of well-lit scenes where the unclothed body of actor, Joel Kinnaman, looks redunka-dunkulous.  I clutched my own belly paunch in despair that all my gym efforts so far have failed to get me in anything like that sort of shape (along with my own Netflix series).  Kinnaman is Takeshi Kovacs.  Well, kind of.  Kinnaman plays the body that the character of Takeshi Novacs has been put in.  Confused?  Panic now.

The key premise of Altered Carbon is that, in the future, humans will contain hardware that their whole being can be downloaded into.  If their body dies, they can then be put in another body, or sleeve.  You can even back yourself up to a Cloud like an iPhone.  This is at the centre of everything about the plot.  If you don’t buy this, then you can just give up.  Just think of all the human interaction complication that can arise from this.  If you’re wealthy, you can just buy new bodies (or clones of yourself) and live forever.  Race, gender, age, religion all become abstract constructs that you can alter at will.  For the casual viewer, it’s a lot to keep up with.

But then, we are talking 350 years into the future.  This is an embarrassment of future to handle.  Body-swapping is just the beginning, but it gets very disorientating when everything you think you know about human morality is called into question as a result of all this sleeving and re-sleeving and double-sleeving, not to mention keeping track of which character is in which body in this very complicated plot.  The temporal plains of action are wide and varied.  Let’s face it, I just wasn’t intelligent enough to follow this, so I lost interest.

With any vision of the future, the glimpses into how the rest of the world looks are always, for me, the most intriguing.  I might have fallen asleep in Guardians Of The Galaxy (as I do in all Marvel films – sorry, Black Panther) but I remember being most interested in all those people walking around in the background.  You know, on those walkways as if the future was simply an outdoor shopping centre.  In Altered Carbon, Bay City (which is San Francisco in hundreds of years’ time) is seen either in micro or macro detail, but the lack of in between prevents it ever seeming real.  It does rain a lot, though, if you enjoy Blade Runner getting ripped off.

In addition, every camera effect ever is used in a tick-box exercise to help the viewer navigate between the past, the distant past, the present, virtual reality and fantasy sequences.  This does little to give the show any edge, and in fact dilutes the impact of its excessive sex and violence.  Initial episodes are a bit like early Game Of Thrones when there could be a boob or willy at any moment.  The only edge seems to come from the fact that, despite all this technological advancement, the main character is still smoking.  What a rebel!

The characters all seem to be stock fodder, lifted from other pop culture works and dropped off without any depth.  Even Kovacs seems to be nothing more than a lot of witty quips, but his voice is so deep from all the smoking that I found it really hard to understand any of them.  They probably weren’t funny anyway.  Given the plot revolves around him waking up after 250 years of being in storage, he doesn’t seem at all arsed by the future in which he finds himself.  Again, too busy smoking, quipping and being in flattering lighting whilst scantily clad.

I’ve ranted so much I’ve forgotten the storyline.  Effectively, it’s a whodunit murder mystery, but with everything else thrown in too.

So there we have it.  Hopefully proof I don’t just love everything I watch.  I want to avoid being an internet troll, though.  Altered Carbon had so much potential, but something about it just didn’t work for me, and this led to each thing about it getting more and more annoying until it all snowballed into the vitriol I have thrown up here.  I probably therefore shouldn’t have continued to put myself through the whole ten hours of it, so that’s my mistake right there.  Maybe there’ll be another series and maybe everyone will love it.  I hope so on both counts.  I just won’t be watching (especially if it clashes with series two of Survival Of The Fittest).