Altered Carbon Trailer, Release Date and Images for Netflix Series

Need a new body? Netflix will have you covered. Death is merely an inconvenience in the new sci-fi noir series Altered Carbon. The story is set more than 300 years in the future, where consciousness can be digitized and put on a memory card called a “stack.” The human body becomes more like clothing, and people can enter different bodies called “sleeves.”

Set to arrive on February 2, the series follows a solider named Takeshi Kovacs, played by Will Yun Lee (The Wolverine) and Joel Kinnaman (Suicide Squad), who is the last survivor of an elite group of interstellar warriors who were defeated in an uprising against the new world order. Kovacs’s mind was imprisoned, or “on ice,” for centuries, until a wealthy man named Laurens Bancroft (played by James Purefoy) offers him the chance to live again if he helps solve a murder… of who killed Bancroft himself.

Altered Carbon Trailer

After Netflix unloaded preview clips and behind-the-scenes stuff, the first Altered Carbon trailer has arrived and it is intense, to say the least.

While the previous glimpses of the Netflix series has already conveyed enough of a plot to properly frame what we’re seeing here, the extent of the imagery and its action sequences could easily pass it off as Hollywood’s latest blockbuster, rather than a small screen serial that’s begging to be binged.

Moreover, the stakes have been raised for Joel Kinnaman’s body-migrated Kovacs, with his sinister benefactor, James Purefoy’s Laurens Bancroft, threatening to “erase” the new life that he’s provided him, should he fail in his mission to solve his murder. (That last line will make a lot more sense once you watch the trailer.)

This sneak peek at Altered Carbon comes in the form of a new preview clip. Serving as both a trailer and a behind-the-scenes look at the series as explained by cast members, we also get a bigger picture of this ambitiously expansive mythology that the streaming giant is bringing to the table. Indeed, the series – set 300 years in the future – noticeably gives off a cyberpunkish Blade Runner/Akira vibe, mixed with a sci-fi consciousness-transference trope famously utilized in Avatar.

Here’s the debut clip.

Altered Carbon Poster

Bagged up like a valuable comic book, we see Joel Kinnaman’s Kovacs depicted in this promo poster just before his new body gets taken for a spin.

Here are some images from the series: 

In one of the first real efforts to bring the cyberpunk genre to television, Netflix ordered Richard K. Morgan’s classic 2002 novel Altered Carbon to series in early 2016. With Laeta Kalogridis, co-writer of Avatar and Terminator Genisys attached as executive producer and showrunner, the series finally follows through on an earlier attempt to get a movie script picked up.

Altered Carbon (the novel) takes place in the 25th century when humanity has spread across the universe, and technology has advanced to the point where personalities can be stored digitally and transferred from body to body. The story follows a longtime imprisoned warrior, Takeshi Kovacs, who is “re-sleeved” into a body to investigate a murder and have a chance to regain his freedom and his life.

In addition to its cyberpunk pedigree, Altered Carbon is also considered a noir drama, which has been Netflix’s fare of choice lately with successes like Jessica Jones and Daredevil as well as avant garde fare such as Sense8.

Altered Carbon Release Date

The cyberpunk TV series, based on a 2002 novel of the same name, will arrive on Netflix on February 2, 2018.