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Netflix goes big with a new trailer for cyberpunk murder mystery Altered Carbon

Netflix goes big with a new trailer for cyberpunk murder mystery Altered Carbon

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‘I didn’t ask you to bring me into this world’

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Netflix has released a new, full-length trailer for its upcoming show Altered Carbon, a tech noir mystery about solving a murder in a world where death has lost all meaning.

Based off of Richard K. Morgan’s novel by the same name, Altered Carbon is set three centuries in the future, where people can transfer their consciousness from one body to another — if they can afford it. The trailer likens it to a person shedding their skin like a snake, allowing them to potentially live forever. Takeshi Kovacs (played by both Joel Kinnaman and Will Yun Lee) is a body-hopping soldier called an Envoy who is killed on a distant planet, but wakes up again 250 years later on Earth. He’s been resurrected by a wealthy man named Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) to investigate Bancroft’s own death.

We’ve seen a couple of short teasers for the show already, one that introduces the consciousness-transferring technology, while the other focused on the story’s unusual murder mystery. This new trailer for the show reveals just how big Netflix is taking the story. Not only does it have a complicated story, but it showcases a huge, futuristic world that evokes the cyberpunk aesthetics of Blade Runner.

The big-budget Altered Carbon seems riskier than some of Netflix’s past investments; Kinnaman has described the series as “a world that’s got a bigger budget than the first three seasons of Game of Thrones.” The streaming service is doubling down in hopes that it’ll become a prestige genre hit like HBO’s Game of Thrones or Westworld. Morgan’s novel has plenty of thematically similar material to work with — political intrigue, complex moral decisions, sex, and violence — but we’ll have to wait until the show’s debut on February 2nd to see how it measures up.