Show + Tell with Paul Flynn
THE FIRST 10 minutes of Netflix’s swishy new sci-fi epic Altered Carbon manage to cram in a group sex scene, a shoot ’em up bloodbath, three different languages, some of the worst tattoos in screen history, several futuristic cityscapes, some face masks nicked from a ’90s Daft Punk video and a po-faced voiceover, conjuring the sort of meaning-of-life epithets an Angelina Jolie lookalike might make her money flogging on the back of mystic cards on Venice Beach. It’s certainly not shy on ambition. What it does lack, oddly, is any discernible flavour of its own.
Altered Carbon is set in a future universe in which you can’t die and most of the urban planning seems to have been sketched out on the back of charity shop DVDS of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Cars fly. All neons are oriental. The scent of openly barbecued meat haunts dimly lit streets. That kind of idea. To lend a touch of originality, drugs are mostly injected through eyeballs.
Our anti-hero is Takeshi Kovacs, a vested hunk with a shady terrorist past who, for reasons of Netflix’s reach in the international TV marketplace, starts off Japanese and is then ‘re-sleeved’ ( given a new body) as the cover of an American fitness magazine. He hints at a full frontal that never quite appears for most of the laboratory vacuumpacked metamorphosis sequence.
Tak has a full-on nervo when he sees his new face. He is ushered to a campy lady of the manor with disarmingly pert nipples whose husband delivers him a mission to save him returning to his pre-life self. Tak must solve a murder! Whose? ‘Mine!’ says the gentleman. After 24 hours on the lash, he will come back with his response. Given the whole set-up of the show collapses if he says no, you can probably guess where this is headed in relatively spoiler-free fashion.
For all its nonsense, there was something that dragged me into Altered Carbon. It doesn’t have that state-of-the-nation thing Black Mirror pertains to, but neither is it a total nerd-fest with no interest to anyone without a full subscription to Comic-con, like American Gods. The preposterous scenarios come thick and fast, the dialogue is banter-strong and, in Joel Kinnaman, formerly a bit-part in House Of Cards, the re-sleeved Takeshi is given a character somewhere between a Raymond Chandler detective and Doctor Who villain. He’s a keeper, for now. Begins Friday, Netflix