Movie Review: Altered Carbon: Resleeved (Netflix)
Altered Carbon was one of Netflix's better sci-fi TV series, and so we were interested to see that the streaming service had just served up an anime movie spin-off based on the show. Altered Carbon: Resleeved came out on Netflix in March earlier this year. The fact that it came from the team behind the classic anime Cowboy Bebop suggested that this could be well worth watching.
One of the main reasons why Altered Carbon was such a big hit was the fact that it played entirely on the cyberpunk trends that have been around ever since Blade Runner came on the screen. Now it seems that the cyberpunk theme can be found anywhere throughout the entertainment industry.
The cyberpunk trend really took off with the Ghost in the Shell manga and anime series in 1989, and it has only blossomed until now. One of the most anticipated games of 2020, Cyberpunk 2077, set to be released this fall, features a cyber-ninja character that drew inspiration from the manga series itself. And there has even been an official Ghost in the Shell cyberpunk slot game that was developed by the highly regarded gaming studio NetEnt. The game combines the fantastic visuals and characters from the hit anime series.
Altered Carbon: Resleeved is set in the same futuristic world created by the author Richard K Morgan in his original Altered Carbon novel. This sees the musclebound former soldier Takeshi Kovacs navigating a dystopian world where humans can live almost infinitely by transferring their consciousnesses into other people's bodies.
In the anime movie, the action focuses on Kovacs as he aims to protect a tattooist and find out who killed a powerful Yakuza boss. To be honest, the storyline kind of fades in comparison to the glorious visuals of the planet Latimer in this movie.
It's a beautifully animated film, the teeming metropolis is wonderfully drawn, and at times it feels like a blend between Blade Runner and Street Fighter. In particular, it's the fight scenes that certainly grabbed our attention, as they seemed to fit somewhere between the US web series Castlevania and the blood-spattered violence of real-action Indonesian movies like The Raid.
We usually like a bit of comedy in our anime movies and found that Altered Carbon: Resleeved was a little po-faced. Despite this, it managed to hold our attention throughout and by the end, we found ourselves rooting for Kovacs as he uncovers the true identity of the CTAC agent Gena and reveals the mysteries of the Yakuza.
However, it must be said that the dialogue in Altered Carbon: Unsleeved tends to fall flat. This is more than surprising as anime scriptwriter Dai Sato worked on the movie, and so we would have expected something a bit more involving. But we do realise that dialogue in many anime movies can often suffer in translation. Still, even so, it's probably better to focus on the endless grunts in the fight scenes rather than find meaning in a somewhat thoughtless script.
We should also mention the fact that this movie felt reasonably lightweight in the fact that the whole thing clocked in at under one and a quarter hours. If you've watched anime masterpieces like Akira, you'll might feel a little shortchanged by what's on offer here.
So is Altered Carbon: Unsleeved going to be a hit among fans of the TV show or for anime fans? There were many improvements in series 2 of Altered Carbon, and I think that this anime spin-off won't divert too much from the events in the TV series.
Above all, it's great to see that Netflix is pressing ahead in its bid to give us more anime content on its streaming platform. We've already seen plenty of great offerings from Studio Ghibli such as Princess Mononoke and hopefully Altered Carbon: Resleeved is the first of many more anime movies from the streaming giant.
