Netflix has a slew of great fantasy and sci-fi series in its portfolio. If we stick to this last genre, being strict, the number is reduced, but there are very notable ones: from the recent pieces of animation ‘Arcane’ and ‘Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners’ to series that are in an area of thematic crossovers, such as ‘Stranger Things’ or ‘Dark’. Yet few shine as bright as ‘Altered Carbon‘, which is still available on Netflix.
Based on an excellent novel by the British Richard K. Morgan, the series collects the inheritance of cyberpunk more classic and updates it, sending us to a distant future in which consciousnesses can be inserted into new bodies. Takeshi Kovacs is a former soldier who experiences this physical transfer when he is released from prison and is practically forced by a millionaire to solve an impossible crime: his own.
Only with this starting point, the aromas of classic genre cinema and literature already reach the viewer, something that is often inextricably linked to cyberpunk since the days of ‘Blade Runner’. Only here the details of a future world where bodies are disposable property are fascinating and lead to an acute reflection on humanity and how even physical presence can become a bargaining chip when ultra-capitalism rolls in in an unscrupulous society.
With cutting dialogues and pure detective fiction, details as memorable and iconic as the artificial intelligence obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe, this series of 20128 is still perfectly recoverable today. Of course, limit yourself to the first season, which makes up an independent story. The second, although it continues Kovacs’ adventures in a new body (Anthony Mackie’s) and recovers some elements, is far below in terms of setting and suggestive introspection on the fragility of the physical (perhaps because it is no longer based on a Morgan original).
Header: Netflix
In Xataka | Three masterpieces of science fiction to start in the genre and that you can watch in streaming
