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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
17
Mixed:
16
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Feb 1, 2018
Season 1 Review:
An engaging cast of characters. ... It's clear that novelist Richard K. Morgan was influenced by "The Matrix" and "Bladerunner," but this series certainly stands on its own. Bay City is a captivating world filled with action and intrigue, making this a Netflix series you won't want to miss.
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The TelegraphFeb 27, 2020
Season 2 Review:
Mackie is up to the challenge of playing Kovacs as an interstellar Philip Marlowe. And with Netflix throwing cash at the screen, Altered Carbon also succeeds at the level of breathtaking spectacle. After a stuttering first season, a would-be blockbuster has belatedly but emphatically achieved lift-off.
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Feb 5, 2018
Season 1 Review:
For a series that makes a lot of basic storytelling stumbles and often seems to feature characters who can only speak in exposition, Altered Carbon’s first season is surprisingly gripping, especially in its superior back half. This is probably the best first season of a Netflix drama since The Crown’s first year dropped in late 2016.
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Feb 1, 2018
Season 1 Review:
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.
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Feb 1, 2018
Season 1 Review:
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.
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Jan 31, 2018
Season 1 Review:
The show’s thought experiment about the end of death in the future is particularly intriguing. What isn’t so thrilling about Altered Carbon is the complexity of the story lines set within the carefully imagined cosmos. The more we learn about Kinnaman’s Takeshi Kovacs, the more slippery the show becomes. ... Kinnaman is good enough to rise above the chaos.
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Feb 27, 2020
Season 2 Review:
The philosophical underpinnings of a show about revenge, redemption, and the little tragedies that come from solving mortality, often give way to schlocky action and slick neon-soaked production design. But under Schapker’s direction, and a new cast comprised chiefly of extremely charismatic actors of color, Altered Carbon may have just found a way to cheat its own death.
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Feb 1, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Altered Carbon is often quite a bit of fun, but its flaws are large and glaring. The dialogue is rarely better than hacky and ham-handed, clunky lines of wannabe hard-boiled detective-speak interlaced with ponderous and exposition-heavy interludes. Kinnaman fares the best, in part because his taciturn character gets to do more showing than telling.
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Jan 22, 2018
Season 1 Review:
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.
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Feb 28, 2020
Season 2 Review:
Missick's addition to the cast changes up the chemistry in good ways, mostly owing to the actor's winning persona and its great fit with Mackie's Kovacs. ... The story itself its somewhat downgraded from a provocative examination of the role mortality plays in defining our humanity to a soap opera with a whole lot of gratuitous punching, kicking, and bleeding – much of it occurring in the premiere.
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The IndependentFeb 27, 2020
Season 2 Review:
Mackie isn’t as stiff as Kinnaman, and there are interesting questions raised by the idea of what comprises a person. It still falls short of its potential, but Altered Carbon has probably done enough to ensure it runs for years to come. A lump of graphite, if not quite the full diamond.
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Feb 19, 2020
Season 2 Review:
The second round of the cyberpunk noir series will feel familiar to those who watched Season 1, as it's mostly a take-the-good-with-the-bad combination of sticking with what worked and not learning from its own mistakes. ... Altered Carbon has an amazing sandbox to work with, but the story doesn't always know how to play in it.
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Feb 2, 2018
Season 1 Review:
A lot of Altered Carbon is very silly, mostly whenever any of the principals converse. Trite dialogue prevails. ... If you like your sci-fi good-lookin’ and tough talkin’, I heartily recommend Altered Carbon. Me, if I want a dose of steely speculative fiction, I’ll reread my old paperbacks of novels by Pat Cadigan and Lewis Shiner.
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TV Guide MagazineFeb 1, 2018
Season 1 Review:
An astounding ambitious production design. ... Every twist of the convoluted and ultimately unsatisfying plot puts Kovacs, and his combative police officer partner Kristin Ortega (the terrific Martha Higareda), into gruesome situations that edge into torture porn. [5-18 Feb 2018, p.10]
Feb 1, 2018
Season 1 Review:
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.
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The Daily BeastJan 29, 2018
Season 1 Review:
Though his supporting cast isn’t particularly memorable, Kinnaman’s devil-may-care gruffness keeps the mood rough around the edges. Unfortunately, Altered Carbon is so busy tying itself up in knots that it fails to grapple with the ethical questions--about what defines a person, and a life; about how morality can exist if mortality is conquered—that are at the heart of its tale.
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Feb 1, 2018
Season 1 Review:
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.
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