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.

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.

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

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.

Think of Altered Carbon as a cyberpunk “Game of Thrones,” except that winter is already here, three centuries into the future.

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.

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.

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.

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

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