Netflix’s 3 Body Problem Shoots for the Stars But Stays Depressingly Earthbound: Review
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post Netflix’s 3 Body Problem Shoots for the Stars But Stays Depressingly Earthbound: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: In mainland China in 1996, a young physicist watches her father get beaten to death in a struggle session during the Cultural Revolution. In 2024 London, a surly intelligence officer named Clarence (Benedict Wong) investigates the mysterious deaths of prominent figures in the scientific community — including the mentor of five brilliant Oxford-educated minds.
Along the way, Clarence and “The Oxford Five” will peel back the layers of intrigue that surround these deaths, both in the present and the past — all tied to a mysterious virtual-reality game, an anti-human movement living on an itinerant cargo vessel in international waters, and a fateful message sent to the cosmos in the 1970s. Before long, a scientific mystery will become a centuries-long arms race to prepare for a possible alien invasion four centuries from now — one humanity is ill-equipped to combat.
I’ve Got 97 Problems, But Foundation Ain’t One: To their credit, writers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are no strangers to adapting dense, difficult genre literature to the small screen; they’re the folks responsible for Game of Thrones, after all. On the other hand, they’re also the ones responsible for the final season of Game of Thrones, so some skepticism is more than a little warranted. This goes double for their adaptation, co-showrun by The Terror: Infamy executive producer Alexander Woo, of Cixin Liu’s trilogy of science fiction novels, a head-spinning melange of literary ideas that feels even more unadaptable at this point than Frank Herbert’s Dune.
To that end, D&D and Woo have twisted and mangled the square peg of Liu’s novel into the constraints of big-budget prestige streaming drama, in ways that work wonderfully in some moments and aggravate in others. For one thing, it’s far more interested in the scientific concepts it’s exploring — quantum particles that can see all and speak to each other instantaneously across the cosmos, the practical applications of sending a human envoy into space — than the people who explore them. There are flashes of For All Mankind’s interstellar ambition here, albeit with a 400-year-long countdown clock on mankind’s aerospace advancement.
Lost in Translation: Netflix threw a lot of money at the screen for 3 Body Problem, and even among its relatively domestic climes (so many scenes take place in apartments, hospital rooms, or offices), the show looks impressive. The third episode, directed by Wall-E and John Carter’s Andrew Stanton, is a dazzling dive into the virtual-reality game the Oxford Five (particularly Jess Hong’s resolute Jin Cheng and John Bradley’s sardonic billionaire Jack Rooney) explore as a vital clue, and a daring mid-season gambit (you’ll know it when you see it) is horrifying in all the right ways.
Apart from that, it’s a largely talky sci-fi story of the classic mold, asking questions essential to the human condition: Given our destructive natures, do we deserve to live? What does life look like when our days are literally numbered? Is it worth fighting for a future we will almost certainly never see?
3 Body Problem (Netflix)
These ideas are interesting in and of themselves, even as it takes the show a solid four episodes to really explore them. But they feel more at home in literature than the televisual medium, despite the overt attempts to streamline the book’s narrative to make it more accessible to a non-book (and, given its globalization of the cast and characters, more Western) audience.
The Oxford Five suffer the most from this, clearly a mishmash of disconnected characters from the books shoved together to force a group perspective on the season’s branching storylines: Jovan Adepo’s Saul is a brilliant scientist whose lack of ambition will be tested by the challenges to come, while Eiza González’s Auggie grapples with the notion of letting governments use her scientific inventions for their own ends.
These ideas are intriguing in concept, but the prototypical Netflix pacing gives them almost too much room to breathe, at the expense of giving these characters much depth. The most interesting folks, frankly, are the flashier supporting roles, like Liam Cunningham’s brusque government honcho in charge of Earth’s resistance, or Rosalind Chao as an embittered older physicist with deep ties to these events.
3 Body Problem (Netflix)
The Verdict: One of the big problems of adapting head-scratching sci-fi novels for the screen is that, when you look too admiringly at the complicated ideas undergirding the story, it’s easy to lose sight of the characters. The Denis Villeneuve version of Dune overcomes this with staggering cinematography and worldbuilding; even Apple TV+’s flawed but compelling Foundation streamlines it with a dazzling cast and fundamental ideas of humanity’s fate in the universe.
3 Body Problem just doesn’t know what to do with its terrestrial cast of characters, and the globalization of its cast dulls what was otherwise a distinctly Chinese perspective with the original novel. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with localizing a work for its intended audience, as long as you replace it with something intriguing; alas, Benioff, Weiss, and Woo lead with their ideas but forgot to make the mouthpieces for these ideas particularly interesting.
Still, the season’s final episodes indicate that the show’s terrestrial scope will undoubtedly expand as the series continues (if it continues), spanning eons and galaxies just like the books. One wonders how they’ll achieve the crazy ideas Liu’s books introduce, even with the sky-high Netflix budget the show sports. But if they do, one hopes the showrunners will learn how to make those unfathomable ideas seem relatably human.
Where’s It Playing? Following its premiere at SXSW, 3 Body Problem burns its apocalyptic ideas right into your retinas on Netflix March 21st.
Trailer:
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem Shoots for the Stars But Stays Depressingly Earthbound: Review
Clint Worthington
Popular Posts
