‘Altered Carbon’ Trailer: Joel Kinnaman Doesn’t Fear Death

It’s a story that’s increasingly familiar — with studios taking less risks, writers and creators are turning to television and streaming services. So it goes with “Altered Carbon,” which comes from  writer-producer Laeta Kalogridis (“Alita: Battle Angel,” “Shutter Island“), who optioned Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 cyberpunk novel “Carbon,” with plans on bringing it to the big screen. However, she found the freedom to tell the tale without compromise on Netflix.

“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,” Kalogridis told EW. “And a hard-R sci-fi movie usually is something like ‘Logan,’ for example, where you’re building out a piece of a franchise.”

Well, “Altered Carbon” isn’t a franchise — at least not yet — but it’s definitely a hard sci-fi series that stars Joel Kinnaman, in a story that unfolds 500 years in the future, where human consciousness can be stored on digital implants, allowing people to essentially live forever by swapping into new bodies. However, murder and intrigue aren’t far behind, and as you’d expect, the future is hardly perfect.

It’s the kind of heady, brainy concept we dig. “Altered Carbon” hits Netflix on February 2, 2018.