3 Body Problem Series Review: An Exciting Science Fiction Thriller That Lives Up To Expectations
Cast: Jovan Adepo, John Bradley, Rosalind Chao, Liam Cunningham, Eiza González, Jess Hong, Marlo Kelly, Alex Sharp, Sea Shimooka, Zine Tseng, Saamer Usmani, Benedict Wong and Jonathan Pryce
Created By: David Benioff, DB Weiss, Alexander Woo
Streaming Platform: Netflix
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars)
3 Body Problem is the new Netflix sci-fi series from the same creators of Game of Thrones, David Benioff and DB Weiss. A highly anticipated title, inspired by the science fiction trilogy of the same name by the acclaimed Chinese author Liu Cixin, which arrives on the streaming platform presenting itself as the new great serial “masterpiece” that winks at legendary titles such as Lost by JJAbrams. Consisting of 8 episodes and with a complex and fascinating plot, 3 Body Problem aims to tell a story of science, psychology, philosophy but above all of humanity and the supernatural. 3 Body Problem is the series of the moment, a title that everyone has been talking about for some time and which, given its scope, we expect everyone to see on Netflix. But after having seen this series in its entirety which takes its name and bases its plot on one of the most difficult and fascinating puzzles in physics, we can say with certainty that it is a masterpiece 3 Body Problem is a series that in some does disappoints expectations. Let’s start with the plot.
As we will see in this review of 3 Body Problems, the story we find ourselves in front of is extremely complex and stratified, very rich in terms of themes, and narratively articulated, so much so that it takes place on different temporal levels. In each episode, which lasts about an hour, so much happens that the viewer has to force himself to pick up the thread of a plot that must give shape to an ever-larger picture. Ambition is the word with which we began this article, but unfortunately, it was perhaps not enough to bring the science fiction “chaos” imagined by Liu Cixin from the printed paper to the small screen: if in certain moments the new Netflix show is visually splendid, narratively captivating, often gets lost in the confusion he creates, dragging the viewer into a fascinating miasma, yes, but at times more confusing than engaging.
3 Body Problem Series Review: The Story Plot
3 Body Problem takes place in two main storylines: the first is set in China in the 1960s, amid the Chinese cultural revolution, and the second in the present day, between Oxford and London. In 1966 we meet Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) a brilliant astrophysicist who, after witnessing the brutal murder of her father by members of her party, is forced into forced labor in a remote location in rural China. If her intelligence and education had made her an “enemy” of a party that demanded approval of certain ideas, things suddenly changed for her there. The work camp is built near a huge laboratory, where a few chosen individuals carry out mysterious experiments. It won’t take long before the woman is made part of the project, and Ye Wenjie will discover that the purpose of the research is to communicate with the other intelligent entities that populate the universe. She will have to discover how to spread the earthly message effectively, and someone, over time, will end up answering her…
Meanwhile, in present-day England, an investigator, Clarence (Benedict Wong) is trying to discover why, both at home and in various locations around the world, an increasing number of scientists are violently taking their own lives. Some of them talked about a strange countdown, others about a hyper-realistic video game they had been invited to play. As if that wasn’t enough, science seems to have suddenly gone mad: in the most important laboratories on the planet, experiments give unpredictable results, as if everything studied and established no longer makes sense. Five brilliant thirty-year-olds, who met while studying physics at Oxford University, meet again trying to shed light on what is happening: among them are Jin (Jess Hong), one of the best theoretical physicists in his field; Saul (Jovan Adepo), a research assistant who saw his beloved mentor commit suicide; Will (Alex Sharp), who did not continue his academic career to become a teacher, Auggie (Eiza González), who decided to exploit his preparation to break into the field of nanotechnology and finally Jack (John Bradley), who after university he founded a company to produce snacks and drinks and became rich.
The five friends find themselves at the center of an increasingly absurd and dramatic situation when, on the one hand, Auggie begins to have vision problems: the woman sees a strange countdown everywhere, a countdown that is approaching too quickly to the end. zero. On the other hand, both Jin and Jack are invited to participate in a mysterious video game, in fact, they find an ultra-modern viewer that transports them into an extremely realistic virtual reality. The aim of the game? Save the planet from cyclical and inevitable destruction. There are many questions, but the answer, the further the vision proceeds, seems to be only one: something dangerous is coming from the deepest space, something that perhaps was called by a Chinese woman, so many decades before…
3 Body Problem Series Review and Analysis
In short, 3 Body Problem stages a pre-invasion that devises a way to provide aliens with the necessary trick to reveal themselves even though their descent to Earth is remote. It is this presence-absence that paradoxically constitutes both the strong and weak points of the series created by David Benioff, DB Weiss, and Alexander Boof. Because the idea of exasperating the nightmare of surveillance, of making it visually concrete in a sort of anti-eye of providence, of creating an enemy who is always and everywhere intruding and unscratchable, inevitably generates a widespread restlessness which is the result of a strong feeling of impotence, of the impossibility of controlling the characters. But the alien threat always gives the sensation of being not very tangible and the tension ends up being dampened by the certainty that their arrival is still far away, that there is all the time needed to think about the counter-offensive because the countdown marks 400 years, that “they are coming” is a sterile warning.
It is precisely on the countdown as a narrative device that 3 Body Problem focuses decisively: it does so by estimating the beginning of the invasion, with Will’s illness progressing, it concretizes it in the countdown that Auggie played by Eiza González begins inexplicably to visualize before his eyes. It wraps everything in uncertainty, in mystery, giving life to a series split halfway between a pre -pre-revelation and a post-revelation, between an incipit full of enigmas but poor in pathos and a second part that becomes more engaging when it provides the protagonists the coordinates to act and avoid the initial passivity. It is then extremely fluctuating in setting the pace and struggles to go beyond a limited spectacularity, all enclosed in disarming scenes of violence and terror which achieve their purpose and even constitute moments of high-quality seriality, but are disconnected, juxtaposed on a collage without particular shocks, disorganic and with a faded tonal substratum.
3 Body Problem gets stuck when it struggles to incorporate genres and tones that are rarely compressed into a coherent structure: the series ranges with a certain temerity from intimate drama to hard and pure sci-fi, from crime fiction to the subgenre of virtual reality, but none of the components are dissected and turned into an underlying theme, an interpretative coordinate, except to decipher the whole. Yet, in the difficulty of combining emotional-personal impulses with more sublime, planetary, cosmic movements, each of these elements makes sure to bring with them valuable ideas, with virtual reality becoming a simulation of physical possibilities, playful entertainment for the spectator, didactic-historiographic and identification tool for the characters, vehicle of solidarity and empathy towards the future oppressor; with Will’s parenthesis marking a vital lyrical path in ensuring a sentimental share that would otherwise be absent; with the core of the extraterrestrial incursion that unfolds slowly but finds its fulcrum in the intriguing human-alien communication.
It is here that 3 Body Problem finds its thematic solidity, in the opposition between two formae mentis, two intellectual structures, in a dichotomy that in some way criticizes and at the same time rehabilitates the human race, understands and at the same time condemns alien civilization. And so in the conversations between the leader of a sect of San-Ti venerators and their “Lord,” two opposing and perhaps irreconcilable perceptive systems are revealed, with the aliens incapable of understanding the symbolic language, of creating stories, of replicating nature mythopoetics of the human being, of understanding and projecting fiction, of conveying knowledge and knowledge through the educational tool of the fairy tale, of the story, of abstraction. In short, they can’t understand humans as beings averse to the literal and accustomed to the literary, and the natural consequence is a profound fear of their faculties of storytelling and mystification. An exchange that more than any other visual solution provides a clear idea of the nature of the enemy and their psychology.
We must then ignore a series of forcings and equip ourselves with an iron will to suspend disbelief because that of The Three Strikes Problem is exaggeratedly and in a completely improbable way a narrative of the chosen ones, of brilliant minds with a crucial role and incredibly everyone belonging to a single friendly nucleus, to a very close circle of long-standing friends. A chorality that, even if it manages to develop the trajectories of all the pieces on the field, does not work when it finds the same and redundant reasons to push them towards their call to arms, in which the weapons are in any case and without admission of variation their uncommon intelligence and their excellence in the scientific field.
Something more could also have been done in the context of their characterization and the construction of their ethics, given that both the aforementioned Auggie, both Jess Hong’s Jin, and the character of Saul (Jovan Adepo), seem united by the possession of an ambiguous and contradictory morality that makes reactions bland, actions inconsistent, wills weak. The resolute Thomas Wade is saved, who has the face of Liam Cunningham, square but credible, the only true bastion of humanity, ready to do anything to defend the future of human life on Earth. Benedict Wong comes out with broken bones because he is a character who is as present as he is irrelevant, who doesn’t have an impact as he should but could redeem himself in the next seasons.
Despite the defects in narrative terms, on the technical side, the 3 Body Problem is resolved with well-made CGI and a direction which, although not a miracle, grows with the passing of the episodes, overcoming the problem episode after episode. of a slightly obsolete teen drama aesthetic and arriving at a staging that looks to Hollywood blockbusters and winks at UK serials. It is clear that 3 Body Problem has every intention of establishing itself as the next important Netflix exclusive: it wants to do so by offering science fiction of large proportions, closely linking it with a series of human dramas that mitigate its cerebral element, which compensates for its the transcendental, who constantly risk slipping and ending up outside the safe edges of the place suspended between the two poles, unbalancing and stumbling, but giving life to a first season which in its preparatory nature manages to make us desire a continuation.
3 Body Problem is a very fascinating series and there is no doubt about that. It is at least at the beginning when we are presented with the origin of the story and the events that triggered a series of consequences that will be the key to the entire narrative and which will change the future of humanity forever. The themes covered are very beautiful and lead to profound and philosophical reflections on the role of science in man’s life as opposed to that of religion, on the limits of the human psyche and its potential, on the devastation of wars, and on how it is impossible to imagine a world without. And then we talk about death, about forms of alien life until we move on to lofty concepts such as the philosophy of language, the capacity for abstraction of the human mind, and faith. Starting from a good structural basis, 3 Body Problem is a series that can be watched with great interest, which requires great concentration in viewing and does not want to be superficial in any way, and this is appreciable. What, however, is perhaps not entirely convincing is the rendering on the screen of a story that is too difficult to be explained and digested in a few episodes and where, often, one gets lost in descriptive moments that slow down the narrative and make the story less enjoyable by making lose the thread of the conversation. The problem of the 3 bodies is looked at but not loved, it fails to create a strong connection with the spectator who remains external to the story, detached and not very involved on an emotional level in the events of its protagonists whom he watches and analyzes with his mind alone.
It almost seems that this first season of 3 Body Problem is just an introduction, a springboard for a story that has yet to come to life and reveal its greatness and we are sure that, going forward, this series will be able to give us beautiful surprises. For now, however, 3 Body Problem remains an intelligent, deep, and enjoyable but not exciting series. Too much information, too fragmented, an extremely disappointing ending, and little linearity make the vision at times complicated, even boring. We are far from Lost, to which this series has been compared, far from the emotions that JJAbrams’ gem was able to convey, from the empathy he knew how to create with the spectators, from its unforgettable twists and its memorable scenes that we remember, from memory, still today. We are far from a masterpiece, but we have the impression that 3 Body Problem, in its first 8 episodes, has held back and that it remains, for now, in a phase of accumulation of potential energy which, however, has yet to be released. And we can’t wait for it to happen.
As with every adaptation, Liu Cixin’s story passing through the hands of Benioff, Weiss, and Woo has undergone cuts and adjustments. The unique socio-cultural context in which the original novels came to life (the story is set entirely in China) is internationalized to be made attractive to a Western audience: if the premise – the part of the story set in the 1960s – is the same, everything the rest is moved, “recontextualized”, however losing that something extra that made the story so particular in its way. The result – as we happened to think for the transposition of the characters, who are multiplied – is flattening: The problem of the 3 bodies, to appeal to a wider audience, ends up losing some of its uniqueness. The premises, the founding ideas, and the main themes are all there – and at times the result obtained by Benioff, Weiss, and Woo is truly spectacular – but the right cohesion is missing for all the gears of the plot to work at their best. As we underlined at the beginning, the show ends up getting lost in the science fiction chaos it created, fascinating the viewer, but failing to involve them.
3 Body Problem Series Review: The Last Words
3 Body Problem curiously encounters the same difficulties as the alien civilization it stages: it orbits around too many autonomous systems, barely dividing itself between the pure science fiction of the alien threat, the entirely human drama of its protagonists, and a detective story with anticlimactic management of mysteries to be revealed. The new Netflix series, however, constitutes an excellent introduction to a saga with great potential, which more than once risks collapsing under the weight of its ambitions, which lacks organicity but manages to glean interesting ideas and moments of strong visual impact and emotion. 3 Body Problem is an extremely ambitious and fascinating series, but unfortunately, it gets lost in the science fiction chaos it created and does not involve the viewer as much as they would like.
3 Body Problem Series Review: An Exciting Science Fiction Thriller That Lives Up To Expectations - Filmyhype
Director: David Benioff, DB Weiss, Alexander Woo
Date Created: 2024-03-21 18:55
4
Pros
- Rewrites the narrative of the alien invasion
- Find interesting insights into the human-extraterrestrial dichotomy
- Visually satisfying
Cons
- Uncertainty in tone
- Fallacious handling of puzzles
- Swinging rhythm
