3 Body Problem Ship Scene: This is How the Most Brutal Ship Scene Was Made

They did it with Game of Thrones and they have done it again with the 3 Body Problem.  David Benioff and DB Weiss are experts in adapting the unadaptable, in successfully bringing to the screen the most ambitious and complicated literary sagas to tell in the audiovisual medium. Their new series, in which they have collaborated with Alexander Woo (True Blood), once again exceeded expectations by successfully addressing the trilogy by Chinese author Liu Cixin, a science fiction success that has already seduced Netflix users. The 3 Body Problem confronts five scientific friends (Jovan Adepo, John Bradley, Eiza González, Alex Sharp, and Jess Hong) with the consequences of a fateful decision made in China in the 1960s.

The protagonists must face the San -Ti, an alien race, that has embarked on its 400-year journey towards Earth to conquer it and wipe out humanity. Of course, aliens also have followers among the inhabitants of our planet, as we discover throughout the series. These San-Ti supporters travel on a ship called Doomsday and are led by the wealthy Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce), who communicates with the invaders. In the fifth episode of the season, precisely called Judgment Day, an operation led by Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) takes place in which, using the advanced nanotechnology of Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), they destroy Evans’ boat in its path through the Panama Canal. The destruction of the ship kills all the people on it, leading to a most graphic massacre.

The Goriest Ship Scene in 3 Body Problem

The series’ visual effects team has assured (via Polygon) that the destruction of Doomsday was one of the most demanding sequences, with no examples to draw inspiration from in real life. It is the adaptation of one of the most terrifying scenes in the book, a reflection of what happens when nanowires are used to cut into pieces a giant ship with thousands of people on board. It should be noted that the series opts for a much more graphic sequence than the novel. While Netflix shows the lives of the inhabitants of the boat, as well as the children who are about to die, not as much attention is paid to these characters on the pages.

“We wanted to show it, we didn’t want to ignore it,” Benioff said: “I think when you see something on the screen, it’s more terrifying than in the books. You read the descriptions, but you don’t see the blood, you don’t see the children escaping, you don’t see the children’s backpacks cut in half”.

“The challenge here is that we have to at least match, if not exceed, people’s imagination when they read the book,” added Woo: “Give them everything that sequence entails. The logistics part probably took more hours of blood and sweat per frame than any other sequence in the series.

Likewise, the cables that destroyed the boat were arranged one meter apart from each other. Stefen Fangmeier, the visual effects supervisor, has compared it to a cake: “Imagine that you have a huge cake that has been cut into different layers and you push it. When he hits the wall, everything starts to slide. Each piece moves forward because it is not connected to anything else. “This is how we visualize it, the top part falls first, taking pressure off the layers below, and everything starts to slide”. The location of the scene was also a challenge. The initial intention was to film in the Panama Canal, but their plans were cut short after the blockage of the Suez Canal by the Ever Given. Thus, the visual effects team, in addition to creating the ship and its destruction, also had to recreate the canal in a rowing facility built for the Olympics outside London and make it more “tropical” in post-production, Fangmeier recalls.

Certain elements were filmed using practical effects (the deck of the ship and the escape of those who were there were recorded at Shepperton Studios in London), but the majority of the sequence was done using CGI. “Deb Riley, our production designer, painted lines on the walls and told us, ‘This is where the fibers would go,'” Weiss recalls: “Anything above those fibers will be cut in half”. “We had LED strips that replicated the speed of the cables as the ship passed by,” Benioff explained: “There was a lot of prep work, and then post-production work by the visual effects team”.

And how was the effect of cutting people into pieces with nanofibers achieved without it being ridiculous? “It’s nice to cut off a torso or even under the head,” Fangmeier said: “It’s a little disgusting, but not so much overall.” “It was a lot of fun in a disgusting way”, agreed Weiss: “There were really fun production meetings about which department was going to do what and how it was all going to come together”. Without a doubt, the destruction of the Last Judgment is the most brutal sequence of the first season of the 3 Body Problem, a scene in which Benioff and Weiss once again demonstrate the visual and narrative ambition with which they approach their projects. While waiting for Netflix to renew the series for a new installment, we can’t wait to see what spectacular new idea the duo behind the Red Wedding take on in the future.