Before showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss soured the Game of Thrones fanbase with a rushed ending, the duo masterfully adapted a series of seemingly unadaptable films. His work has been duly praised. Writer and screenwriter George R.R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire as a partial response to the constraints of television, with vast ensembles, large-scale battles that could not be incorporated into the script. , created a story filled with sex, violence, and sudden death. For NBC, CBS, etc. This book series began in his 1996 year. This was just a few years before the rise of premium cable and the driving force of culture made television more hospitable to artistic ambitions and less susceptible to the influence of the FCC. Still, Benioff and Weiss, with a great cast and strong support from his HBO team, have done an extraordinary job of translating Martin's vision into a nuanced drama with an abundance of antiheroes and conflicting viewpoints. Did. “Game of Thrones” was a smash hit, a smart, thoughtful, and clearly loving take on its source material, until it ultimately disappointed.
For the next big leap, producers are teaming up with True Blood alum Alexander Wu to take on an even tougher challenge. His science fiction trilogy in China, “Reminiscences of Earth's Past,” spans hundreds of years and consists of mostly unconnected characters and multi-page explanations of his ABCs of particle physics. To turn author Liu Cixin's work into a Netflix series, the team will have to do more than secure the resources and regain the trust that Game of Thrones lost as it limped along until the end. It won't happen. this The adaptation required rethinking large parts of the plot from scratch while maintaining Liu's themes, not to mention visualizing on screen a concept with less precedent than the fantasy tropes Martin developed and subverted. there is. The result shows some of the strain of this daunting task, but it also proves that the early seasons of “Thrones” were no fluke or the work of Martin alone. Benioff and Weiss remain master adapters, working with Wu to open up an accessible gateway to a highly esoteric story while presenting the action with suitably epic scope.
“The Three-Body Problem” and “The Three-Body Problem” — the title of Liu's first volume has been changed enough to differentiate the book and the show, though not enough to avoid confusion — are the same It starts with and location. As the Cultural Revolution tears China apart, young scientist Ye Wenjie (Jing Zheng) witnesses his father being bludgeoned to death by a mob in a fit of anti-intellectual fervor. This scene sets up his one of the story's most powerful ideas. The idea is that brilliant minds may become disillusioned with humanity, turning their allegiance elsewhere, convinced that our species has no hope of directing its own destiny.
Rooted in a mysterious military base, Ye's radicalization is interspersed in flashbacks throughout the eight-part season's early episodes. The majority of “The Three Body Problem'' takes place in modern times, with investigator Da Shi (Benedict Wong) investigating a series of apparent suicides by prominent researchers from around the world. At the funeral of an Oxford University scholar, five of his former classmates are reunited. They would later play a major role in an event that became a slow-motion global catastrophe. physicists Jing Chen (Jess Hong) and Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo); materials scientist Auggie Salazar (Eiza Gonzalez); wealthy entrepreneur Jack Rooney (John Bradley); And Will Downing (Alex Sharp) is sick. The older Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) is also there, but it is initially unclear how she came to England or how she spent the intervening years.
Many of these characters are invented, fused together, or significantly changed to streamline the story. It may seem unbelievable that such a conflict of interest happens to involve a small group of friends, but as the “three-body problem” unfolds, it becomes the most unbelievable of all the increasingly outlandish conspiracies. This is one of the aspects. Instead of raising a few eyebrows, “The Three Body Problem” features a core cast that serves as an anchor to a literally high-flying story about human survival. By the finale, cryogenic refrigeration and nuclear space travel are casually introduced into the equation. By the time we get there, we find ourselves in Jack's boyish hedonism, Saul's cynical personality, and Will's unrequited love for Jin. The “three-body problem” is now television, and television requires a compact set of interdependent actors, similar to a workplace or family unit. Only Jin's boyfriend, British naval officer Raj (Samer Usmani), feels truly peripheral. Their relationship seems virtually non-existent, and it seems like an awkward way to introduce players who quickly cut off their own journeys.
After the death of their leader, each Oxford University graduate finds himself caught up in an ongoing conspiracy. Auggie starts seeing a creepy countdown everywhere he looks. This is a hallucination that seems to be related to nanofiber research. Jin and Jack are sent copies of the same futuristic headsets that Daishi keeps finding at crime scenes. This is his ultra-advanced VR game, which includes eye-popping footage from series-premiere director Derek Tsang and his colleagues, including “Thrones” stalwart Jeremy Podeswa. You're on a mission to save civilization from an unpredictable cataclysm. Jin's game is set in imperial China, while Jack's is set in medieval England. Players command reality with a bizarre mix of historical detail and computer-aided effects. NPCs will either “dehydrate” themselves into flattened shells to wait out extreme weather events, or suffer in horrifying reality if they don't catch it in time. The game has a sense of urgency and offers clues to the motives of the people who built and distributed it.
The actual three-body problem is a puzzle of physics in which the motion of three masses in orbit around each other, whether molecules or planets, cannot be consistently predicted. This game is one of his ways of illustrating such unstable and intelligent ideas, and the “three-body problem” trick consistently succeeds. Substances invisible to the human eye then set off a series of breathtaking actions, and our inability to see the source of such chaos only fuels our fear and awe. The moment when the entire Earth comes face-to-face with the extraterrestrial forces behind the game, a dead scientist, and Augie's vision is depicted in a trippy visual that blends Inception and War of the Worlds. While “3 Body Problem'' is based on the story of curious young people, the show is also imbued with a sense of nerdy grandeur.
Benioff, Weiss, and Wu aren't always able to bridge the gap between these two poles. It can be jarring to hear characters in a decidedly modern setting discussing building a spaceship factory on the moon. (Despite the aforementioned scenes, some of the most outlandish elements of “Three Body Problem” are explained rather than shown.) “Thrones” composer Ramin Djawadi Although offering a captivating theme, his score has to share space with pop. In their efforts to explain the events of the show in the local language, the soundtrack sometimes contains distracting songs. One suspects that the world of Ryu is so abstract that even with the best possible adaptation it will be difficult for some viewers to fully understand, but the series As the process continues, the hurdle will become even higher.
Nevertheless, “3 Body Problem'' feels surprisingly close to that ideal. And not all of that achievement is due to structural choices or filmmaking feats. Stoic and powerful, Chao creates a stirring portrait of fanaticism hardened in regret. Among the young cast, Hong projects intellect and emotion in equal measure. The 3 Body Problem is ultimately a story about asymmetric warfare, pitting humanity against an enemy we can't see and understand. Therefore, it's even more important to make one side of the exchange indelible enough to run the show on its own.
“3 Body Problem” premiered at SXSW on March 8th. All eight episodes of “3 Body Problems'' will be available to stream on Netflix on March 21st.
