Netflix's 'Altered Carbon' Air Date, Plot News: Cult Sci-Fi Thriller Drops February
Netflix's "Altered Carbon" raises the bar on its original programming roster. The upcoming science fiction thriller looks like an ambitious undertaking, which might become the next hit for the streaming platform.
The show is an adaptation of the novel that Richard K. Morgan published in 2002. Its complicated story is comparable to "Blade Runner and "The Matrix" and has the markings of prestige television.
Set 500 years into the future, "Altered Carbon" delves in a world where humans can store their personalities and consciousness digitally and enable body swaps. Thus, people can live as immortals in this dystopian universe thanks to a technology dubbed as Stack.
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Not everyone likes this technological development though as it poses ethical and metaphysical problems, especially when the super wealthy still controls everything. At the heart of the story is Takeshi Kovacs, an ex-soldier from an elite force, who are tasked to solve the murder of an immortal being.
Netflix released first look photos from "Altered Carbon" featuring stars Joel Kinnaman (Kovacs), Chris Connor (Poe) and Ato Essandoh (Vernon Elliot). Kinnaman's character holds a severed head in one of the photos, which hints of a violet encounter with perceived rebels. The streaming platform also released a featurette to partly explain what goes on in "Altered Carbon."
The TV adaptation of "Altered Carbon" comes from showrunner Laeta Kalogridis ("Terminator Genisys") who treats this as her passion project. She optioned the film rights to the story the moment the book came out and originally planned to develop "Altered Carbon" as a film feature.
"The complexity of the story requires — as noir often does — to make something that's an extremely twisty murder mystery, but it also had to be hard-R tonally," the showrunner said. "And a hard-R sci-fi movie usually is something like Logan, for example, where you're building out a piece of a franchise."
James Purefoy ("Trollhunters") also stars as the wealthy Laurens Bancroft. He hires Kovacs to solve his murder. At the same time, Bancroft wields control over Kovacs' freedom.
Netflix scheduled "Altered Carbon" for launch on Friday, Feb.2, at 3:00 a.m. EST. The series will have 10 episodes. "Game of Thrones" director Miguel Sapochnik shot the pilot episode.
