Altered Carbon (Netflix) Review

Altered Carbon is an impressive new series from Netflix.

Impressive it may be, but is it good? Does it pass the test you can define with a single question: "Do I want to find out what's going to happen next?"

The answer is...yes, but barely.

The basic premise, the production values, the actors, and the writing are all very good.

The plot gets a little sketchy all too often. Why do I say this? If I fast forward through a couple of minutes, and I did so repeatedly, without missing anything, then there is too much fluff. A lot of gratuitous sex and distracting violence that didn't add anything to the story. I'm all for seeing naked people, but if they're just standing around talking, or sometimes trying to kill each other, that kind of kills the buzz.

Some may like non-linear plots more than I. Maybe I should say "tolerate" instead. Few of the flashbacks are really necessary for the plot and some are long and get tedious. Oh, and there are subplots, plenty of those. Again, most of those don't relate to the main plot so you have to figure out which things are important and which are not.

So, to summarize the plot, slow, sometimes bloated and tedious with its meandering storyline.

But, there is good.

The premise, and some of the plot twists, if you can hang in and wait for them, are clever and unique. It is not only cyberpunk/scifi, but a mystery that grabbed my interest enough for me to see it through til the end...and maybe even be glad that I did.

If you can get past the idea of DHS (Digital Human Storage), sleeves (bodies), and stacks(the storage devices that store, upload, and download memories and, and, one would assume, consciousness). There are some interesting consequences that the story explores, and some great acting by surprising characters in ways I would not have anticipated. Ortega's grandmother is one such surprise.

Will you like it? If you like a complex story with lots of stuff going on and you enjoy sifting through everything to figure out what is important and what's not, then I suspect you will.

If you like a plot where most things determine how the story will end, or, at least, tell you more about what a character is all about, then you probably won't enjoy it as much.

I'm not a big fan of cyberpunk. I like having the technology skirt the line of believability, rather than leave it far behind, but this story could have drawn me in. It almost did...or maybe it just barely did, I'm not sure.

I don't care much for alternate histories either, but The Man in the High Castle succeeded to a level that Altered Carbon did not. Really good fiction engages you when the genre is not normally to your taste. By that measure, Altered Carbon is OK, but not great.