Cyberpunk masterpiece feeds on ‘Altered’ states.
To get the most out of the dense and deeply unsettling cyberpunk masterpiece “Altered Carbon,” buckle yourself in, prepare to be frequently confused about what is going on, who’s who, not to mention who’s what, and have faith that your willingness to suspend disbelief will pay off. Because it will. “Altered Carbon,” whose 10-episode first season is available now on Netflix, is based on Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 novel and set in Bay City, formerly San Francisco. The only reference to the overcrowded city’s former existence is the Golden Gate Bridge, now encrusted with housing. The streets teem with filth, steam, darkness and crowds of people with hollow stares. Skyscrapers reach above the fog and polluted air, as if gasping for breath.
In the future, death has become temporary. The essence of a human being is stored in a capsule known as a memory stack, implanted in the spinal cord at the base of the skull. When the physical body dies, life continues as the stack is implanted in a new body, called a sleeve. Most people manage a couple of sleeves before absolute death.
This is basic to understanding what happens in “Altered Carbon,” because the main character may be mistaken for two different people. We first meet Takeshi Kovacs ( Joel Kinnaman) when he is hired by a wealthy man named Laurens Bancroft ( James Purefoy) to find out who killed him. He’s been put back together again but his memory stack is missing the 48 hours prior to his death. He wants to prove he didn’t take his own life. Kovacs is now wearing the sleeve of a former San Francisco cop named Ryker. But previously, he was an Asian boy whose mother was killed and who was separated from his sister, Reileen. He grew up to be a revolutionary. As adults, Kovacs, in his previous sleeve, and Reileen are played by Will Yun Lee and Dichen Lachman.
That’s only one of the many layers in “Altered Carbon” plot, which spins on constant unreliability. Characters may not be who you think they are because they can clone, inhabit a new sleeve or, in Kovacs’ case at one point, become “double-sleeved.” Time is ever fluid. In fact, the origin story for Kovacs is related to us in pieces, and even then, in reordered chronology. Characters we are conditioned to believe are allies, turn out to be enemies. And this doesn’t even begin to explain the Meths, a group of wealthy people who can afford to resleeve after living many lives and often gather in a massive spaceship floating over the city called Head in the Clouds, where they can realize their every fantasy, no matter how sexually perverse or violent.
The world is filled with sex and violence, all of it without passion or purpose, or so it seems. Kovacs insists he cares for no one because he is an Envoy, a specifically engineered military veteran of previous planetary wars. He has also been conditioned by experience in war and in life — or, more to the point, his previous life. Yet over time, we see his hardened indifference begin to soften, especially toward a San Francisco cop named Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), toward his sister and toward a revolutionary leader named Quellcrist (Renee Elise Goldsberry).
If you are a newcomer to cyberpunk, it obviously helps to enjoy science fiction itself. Even if you have enjoyed other cyberpunk films and TV shows, such as “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix” series, they are relatively more linear than the complexity of “Altered Carbon.”
But one easy way into the show is to understand that cyberpunk stretches back to a more traditional form of storytelling: detective fiction. The heart of the story is straight out of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, right down to Kovacs’ narration whose roots are in ’40s noir films. Kovacs, in either sleeve, is a futuristic Sam Spade, in an equally futuristic black-and-white world — both thematically and in fact. The only moments of lush color occur in past tense, when we meet Quellcrist and her post-hippie-era revolutionaries in a dense green forest.
The series was created by Laeta Kalogridis, with Morgan serving as an adviser. Most of the performances are chillingly effective, especially Kinnaman, Purefoy, Goldsberry, Higareda and Lee. Lachman’s line delivery borders on robotic at times, but her mysterious presence makes it easy to overlook that minor flaw.
It is impossible to be a passive viewer of “Altered Carbon.” The series manipulates our take on what’s real and when at all times, keeping us off guard at every moment, even when some of the major questions are answered in the final episode.
Think of “Altered Carbon” as a cyberpunk “Game of Thrones,” except that winter is already here, three centuries into the future.