Well, I've been consuming a lot of different things this year, mainly because I wanna keep up with more media. One of the lacking spots from my End Of The Year awards was TV. I love TV but I found that most of my watching focused on the superhero genre. So I decided to search up some of the favoured shows this year and try my hand at them. The first one to come up was Netflix original 'Altered Carbon'. My dad had also started the season slightly before me and said 'It's like Blade Runner', a phrase that got me excited initially and after the first episode quickly went away.
Let's get a couple of the positives out of the way first though. What do I like about this show? Well as a big Blade Runner fan I do love the cyberpunk/noir setting it is clearly going for, the sets and CGI are alright for a TV show but obviously don't expect Blade Runner 2049 quality here. I also enjoy a lot of the ideas laid out in the first episode, the concept of 'stacks' and 'sleeves' is SUPER interesting. The idea is that the human consciousness is data compiled into a USB type thing called a 'stack' and slots into the back of the neck of bodies named 'sleeves'. Immediately you see story wise and acting wise this can be really interesting and it does in some really special gleaming moments. You also have the lead character being acted by Joel Kinnaman, which sadly most people will know as Rick Flag from Suicide Squad, but who I mainly know as Robocop in the Robocop reboot from 2014. I really loved his performance in Robocop, here he is also a shining star but not without faults. I found that he mumbled A LOT in the first episodes and it crops up here and there in later episodes too.
So as you can see, even with my positives I have to clarify certain bits, because honestly this show is a mess. I found most of the acting to be poor or straight up bad, the only amazing bits are ones where a characters stack is put into a different characters sleeve, the best example of this is the AMAZING performances from Matt Biedel who in episodes 4, 5 and 6 plays a minor character who is a thug being put into jail to a Spanish nanny and the then a Russian crime boss. Or one of the main characters in the tail end of the season played by Cliff Chamberlain, which is just a distraught mother. There are other very good examples of this throughout but the standard acting is just not good. Dichen Lachman who plays the big bad of the season is the clear worst, and for the first few episodes so was Martha Higareda although she does drastically improve as the series continues.
Next we have to get to the actual story, it starts in an intriguing place, the main character Takeshi Kovacs, played by Kinnaman, is brought back from the dead/jail (its weird) and is tasked on solving a murder. Sounds cool and fun right? Well it gets massively convoluted and dumb from that point on wards. Without having to completely spoil the series, by the last episode I still didn't know what was happening fully and the character motivations FOR EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENED IN THE SHOW from the big baddy LITERALLY MAKES NO SENSE.
One of the main issues why it is all over the place right until the end is because a lot of things that would be classed as world building are never properly explained. The fact that when I put 'altered carbon' into google and the recommended searches are '653' 'DHF' 'protectorate' etc etc. Is a testament to that fact that this show fails to give the audience the proper context they need. There is so many in-world slang and ideas crammed into this that its too hard to follow when it isnt explained fully to you.
Annoyingly I did watch the whole thing, for me the show didn't get intriguing properly until around episode 4 or 5, where a plot point changes how some characters interact, but from there it goes downhill. I honestly believe this show should've been half the episode count, the best bits and important story beats could've been cleaned up and more understandable chopped down into 5 episodes, destroying all the nonsense filler that they clearly tried to cram in to hit 10 episodes. The biggest shock for me is that so many people are praising this thing, an audience rating of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes baffles me. But obviously if this still sounds like something you're interested in the only way to know is to check it out yourself, obvious there is a group out there who fully enjoyed this show, my only advice would be, if you're not convinced by episode 3, you won't be, and you'll regret spending the time with the show.
