Altered Carbon Reveals Stunning NSFW Trailer
There's a whole new futuristic dystopia coming to Netflix and it's the biggest sci-fi world you've probably never heard of.
The streaming service released the first and NSFW trailer for Altered Carbon, an epic series based on the acclaimed 2002 cyberpunk novel by Richard K. Morgan. Although it feels a little like Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Black Mirror, it's definitely unlike anything you've seen before. Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island) writes and produces while Miguel Sapochnik (who helmed the "Battle of the Bastards" episode of Game of Thrones) directs.
The story takes place 500 years in the future when human consciousness can be removed from the body and stored on digital implants called "stacks." That allows the rich to eternally upgrade their bodies (known as "sleeves") and basically live forever. The main character is an elite soldier named Takeshi Kovacs, a killer for hire who became a revolutionary.
Kovacs is imprisoned and his conscious is stored away only to be inserted into a new body (Joel Kinnaman of Suicide Squad) centuries later. He was brought back by a wealthy mogul named Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) who offers to pardon Kovacs if he can solve a murder–the death of Bancroft's previous sleeve.
The release of Kovacs also piques the interest of Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), a detective with her own complicated past.
Kalogridis has been working on Altered Carbon for a while, first optioning the rights to the novel about 15 years ago with plans to make it a movie. But it wasn't an easy sell to studios thanks to the difficulty of creating a completely new futuristic world, some adult material, and the hard-R rating. "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," she told Entertainment Weekly. "And a hard-R sci-fi movie usually is something like Logan, for example, where you're building out a piece of a franchise."
But Netflix was intrigued and gave Kalogridis a chance.
"It's very different than what else is out in this space," Kalogridis said. "There's some Philip K. Dick in there, William Gibson, obviously Ridley Scott, and actually some Orson Welles and John Huston. We tried to imagine what a potential globalized future on Earth would look like, with a certain amount of technological change, a certain amount of technological familiarity and a very large degree of human familiarity."
The first season, which consists of 10 episodes, will premiere Feb. 2, 2018.