Richard K. Morgan’s heavy-hitting cyberpunk noir novels, the first of which has now been turned into the ten-part Netflix series “Altered Carbon” with highly uneven results, weren’t the kind of science fiction that had a utopian view of technological advancement. The novel, and to only some extent the show, understand that new technologies tend to reinforce, not undermine, entrenched power structures and humans’ tendency to be absolute rotters to one other.
The neon-noir show’s highly reluctant hero and purportedly charming rotter is one Takeshi Kovacs, one of those cynical and vaguely amoral mercenary types who populate the darker reaches of the cyberpunk genre. The setting is a few centuries in a future that appears to have been designed by copying storyboards from “Blade Runner.” By this point a couple big developments have changed society. First, humanity has populated other planets, though we don’t see much of them in the series. Second, the Singularity —the tech-utopians’ dream of uploading human minds to the cloud and thus achieving a kind of silicon immortality — has come about through a more flesh-and-blood technique than currently imagined.
In the face-shifting and corpse-splattered world of “Altered Carbon,” people’s personalities are stored in dollar-coin-sized capsules called “stacks” embedded at the base of their skulls. At the point of death, if the stacks aren’t disabled or the person hasn’t taken a catastrophic shot to the head, they can be reimplanted in another body, or “sleeve.” This means that if the funds are available and a person is lucky, they can live forever by continually “resleeving.” Sometimes, though, supplies are limited. That’s why the half-Japanese and half-Slavic Takeshi Kovacs is resleeved in the first episode into the highly Scandinavian and unemotive chassis of Joel Kinnaman.
In the opening scene, disgraced former elite soldier Kovacs ended up on the losing end of a slo-mo gunfight, the first of many, with stormtroopers from the Protectorate. (This vaguely defined United Nations structure appears to run the galaxy with the iron-fisted impunity that keeps black helicopter types up at night, and appear here mostly to supply cannon fodder for the protagonists to lay waste to.) After spending two hundred and fifty years in cold storage because he “blew some shit up, killed some people,” the defrosted and resleeved Kovacs is brought to the fantasy-world aerie of the obscenely wealthy Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy), who wants the highly recommended Kovacs to solve a murder: “Mine.”
Laurens recently took a round to the head. This is not really a problem for the fabulously rich and centuries-old oligarchs called “Methusalehs,” or “Meths,” whose democracy-killing accumulation of wealth and power plays out like a manifested nightmare of today’s progressive economists. Since Meths like Laurens say things like “God is dead, we have taken his place!,” they have clone sleeves stacked up by the dozen just in case, and also get periodically wirelessly uploaded to a cloud server. He’s missing about 48 hours of memory from before he was killed, but is otherwise fine. Laurens is really just curious about who wanted to kill him. Murder is a nuisance, after all.
After Laurens gives Kovacs his marching orders and an essentially unlimited credit line — a nice upgrade from Philip Marlowe’s $25 a day plus expenses — the dour but snarky Kovacs heads out into the rain- and neon-splashed chaos of “Bay City.” This isn’t an assignment he wants, but his new sleeve has been leased to Bancroft Industries, and it beats being frozen again. In the manner of all anti-heroic gumshoes, Kovacs finally starts digging into the murder of a man he clearly despises and wouldn’t mind seeing truly murdered, or “real death” as it’s called in one of the series’ few successful attempts at wit (killing a body in a resleeveable way is a crime akin to manslaughter, termed merely “organic damage”).
But for the slapped-on future tech and the occasional bit of plot hijinks when a character gets resleeved into an odd body — one lengthy gag involves a woman reconnecting to her dead Mexican grandmother, who appears in the body of a recently-killed skinhead gunman —most of the plot mechanics are straight detective noir, in which the sarcastic hero tries to do the bidding of a suspicious client while trying not to get killed.
A grumpy guy with an itchy trigger finger and a yen for self-destruction, Kovacs sets about getting hammered and accruing secondary characters who can assist or hinder him. His primary backup is Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), an obsessive cop there to exchange some flat and unconvincing opposites-attract dialogue with the similarly wooden Kinnaman. There’s a requisite femme fatale in Laurens’ ice-cold wife Miriam (Kristin Lehman) and a sidekick, Vernon (Ato Essandoh), to keep Kovacs from veering too far into antisocial behavior. Just about the only intriguing addition to Kovacs’ misfit band is Poe (played by Chris Conner with just the right dash of whimsy), an endearingly friendly AI running the gothic-themed hotel Kovacs checks into.
Perhaps thinking that the primary mystery plot was not enough to sustain the show through ten episodes, the showrunners made sure to slap on as many shootouts as possible. The tone aims for hardboiled future noir, with high kill ratios, a gleeful take on body horror, and the casual kind of sadism familiar to sci-fi movies like “Repo Men.” They also knitted in a messy and unconvincing flashback structure to make the grim Kovacs a three-dimensional character. A particularly lengthy section is taken up with his past as an Envoy, a band of rebel ex-military types who trained with Jedi-like precision to stop the death-defying stack technology from ever being implemented.
Little of this works in the end. The show flings out many fascinating ideas, including that bravery doesn’t exist in a world of assumed resleeving and Kovacs’ observation that “technology advances but people don’t…we’re smart monkeys.” But since this is mostly discarded to get to the next bit of blood-spattering — a lot of time is spent in virtual torture cells where characters are killed in diabolically painful ways only to be brought back to life and broken all over again — the whole thing turns into a grind by the fourth episode.
For a show theoretically critiquing the dehumanization of people in a tech-besotted capitalist free-for-all, even in the limited framework of a cyberpunk action series, “Altered Carbon” can hardly manage to get a pulse out of its automaton-like characters. Maybe one day the whole storyline can get resleeved. [C]
“Altered Carbon” launches on Netflix on February 2nd.