
For long stretches, however, “Altered Carbon” asks Kinnaman to stay in the slightly cynical, tough-guy mode recognizable from countless films about private detectives down on their luck. For much of “Altered Carbon,” Kovacs, a former soldier with a murky past, is played by Joel Kinnaman, an actor capable of great subtlety and emotional transparency. The gray weather often suits the mood of Takashi Kovacs, who has woken up from a 250-year sleep and been unwillingly stuck with the job of solving a rich man’s murder. (Centuries from now, is it really always going to be raining?) Those moments of comic relief and laconic humor are most welcome, and may allow some viewers to forgive the drama’s overuse of certain sci-fi cliches. The black-clad hotelier is too caught up in the daring and even romantic quest of the story’s hero - and the hotel’s only guest - to be properly Goth and glum. Of its many delicious grace notes, my favorite may be Poe (Chris Conner), the tart yet enthusiastic artificial intelligence that runs a hotel named after Edgar Allan Poe. Dick’s Electric Dreams” play out at once.īut as it progresses through its 10-episode season, “Altered Carbon” finds its own groove.
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Some of the cityscapes look like they came directly from the Ridley Scott classic, and on a narrative level, watching the first few installments of “Altered Carbon” feels like seeing several different scenarios from the Amazon anthology series “Philip K. In the early going, this highly serialized tale, which is based on a novel by Richard Morgan, can come off as a bit too imitative of “Blade Runner”-esque projects and the film noir genre. The metaphor of many iterations - copies that evolve or degrade depending on the resources available - is an apt one for “Altered Carbon,” which mixes together a host of familiar sci-fi ideas and storytelling conventions. These extensions are only possible for individuals with sufficient funds, of course: Living forever, which involves growing or acquiring an array of sleeves, is for the very rich.
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To see a sci-fi show that’s a hard R-rated sci-fi show with a big budget, so they’re really going to be able to create this entire world … I just started drooling at that possibility.”Īltered Carbon filmed in metro Vancouver from mid-November last year to early July this year.“ Altered Carbon” is packed with facsimiles: The main conceit of this slow-building but satisfying series is that people can download their consciousness into a series of bodies, or “sleeves,” indefinitely. It’s something that’s never been done before, and I’m a big fan of intelligent sci-fi. “They’re really going to be able to create a world that’s got a bigger budget than the first three seasons of Game of Thrones,” Joel Kinnaman told Yahoo News. “It’s going to be something special.

Related: Altered Carbon’s Joel Kinnaman & Martha Higareda Film in Downtown Vancouver. Martha Higareda is Kristin Ortega, a lieutenant in the Bay City Police Department.

Kovacs must solve a single murder in a world where death is almost obsolete or return to the eternal darkness of the cortical stack. Joel Kinnaman (Suicide Squad) stars in Altered Carbon as Takeshi Kovacs, the last of the interstellar warriors known as the Envoys, who after 500 years in dark storage has his consciousness downloaded into a new body (sleeve) in the San Francisco of the 25th Century. And in downtown Vancouver in the former Canada Post building. The 10-episode adaption of Richard Morgan’s cyberpunk book filmed mainly in Surrey’s Skydance Studios on giant sets built on the new five sound-stage studio converted from the former Province and Vancouver Sun printing press. Netflix’s upcoming hard R-rated sci-fi series Altered Carbon has wrapped filming in Vancouver.

In the 25th century, humans are digitized and can be downloaded into different bodies, making death almost obsolete.
