Netflix has revealed the first teaser trailer for its new upcoming cyberpunk science fiction drama series, Altered Carbon, becoming available from 2 February 2018, set 500 years into the future and based on Richard K. Morgan's 2002 novel.
Rumoured, and not confirmed by Netflix, the dystopian Blade Runner-esque new series is apparently one of the most expensive new series show greenlit by the global video streaming service.
Altered Carbon will have a first season of 10 episodes, and is set in a future where the wealthy are in a sense able to live "forever".
Like The Matrix, people can have their memories and consciousness uploaded into the cyber cloud (called the "stack"), and can constantly download it into new biological bodies (called "sleeves"), thanks to a company called Psychasec that has the slogan "Live forever, in the body you deserve".
The future is dark and grim and Altered Carbon has a pervasive science fiction noir quality, where a billionaire hires a private mercenary to investigate and find out who killed him - since someone murdered his previous body.
Takeshi Kovacs (played by both Will Yun Lee and Joel Kinnaman), a private investigator, is downloaded from the stacks into a new body (against his will) centuries later, tasked to solve the murder of Earth's wealthiest man, Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy).
Takeshi is a former elite interstellar warrior known as an Envoy who has been imprisoned for 300 years and is downloaded into the bleak and dreary future he previously tried to prevent.
