Altered Carbon

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.

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.

The roads that Altered Carbon takes to its destination aren’t new to us but enough of us have enjoyed previous versions of these trips to appreciate this version of the ride.

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.

When Altered Carbon is unafraid of embracing its the pulpiness at its core, it becomes both more enjoyable and more addictively textured.

When the season does intermittently sag beneath the weight of its extensive world-building and philosophical inquiries, Altered Carbon still manages to enthrall audiences with a winding detective mystery told in timeless noir fashion.

Insanely violent, but, yup, often beautiful and intoxicating. A mind-bender that can be worth the bender.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When the series gets too far away from the Bancroft investigation, Altered Carbon stumbles.

Altered Carbon could become almost anything. But as with most Netflix series--as well as with most Meths--that limitless potential can too often lead to sedentary self-indulgence.

Big issues of body, mind, identity and technology shuffle around the Altered Carbon universe, but the show often drags its feet in order to fill its individual episodes’ running times.

Altered Carbon is so busy trying to wow viewers by constantly one-upping the imagery and the intensity that it barely pauses to consider its story. The writing is also distinctly clunky: a hodgepodge of vacant platitudes and canned spirituality.

Every so often, Season 1’s disturbingly intense focus on flesh proves compelling, but Altered Carbon never fully comes to life.

The series is convoluted, digressive and long. ... Eventually, you do arrive at the end, which has a certain mathematical balance and, despite (or perhaps because of) some corniness, prompts deeper feelings than you might have expected.

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.

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]

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.

When Carbon focuses on Bancroft's murder, it's most successful, unspooling a mystery entwined with vice and riches. But more often, it gets lost in extraneous subplots and characters. Visually, the series is so dark you can't see the action.

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.

There are some compelling scenes and moments in Altered Carbon, but at no point do any of them convince me to care about what happens to the main characters.