Like the George R.R. Martin novels that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss adapted into their mega-hit HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones, Chinese author Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past sci-fi trilogy has a massive fan following for its intricate world-building and sweeping, epic narrative. So their new Netflix series based on Liu's books comes with extraordinarily high expectations. Co-created by Benioff, Weiss and Alexander Woo, 3 Body Problem (titled after the first book) is an ambitious but disjointed sci-fi epic about an impending alien invasion, without the sprawling grandeur that Benioff and Weiss brought to Game of Thrones.
Liu's novels are set in China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s and feature mostly Chinese characters, and there's already a Chinese live-action adaptation (Three-Body, which streams in the U.S. on Peacock).
So it's reasonable that Benioff, Weiss and Woo relocate most of the story to the English-speaking world, although it comes at the loss of some cultural specificity. They haven't just transposed the narrative to another setting, though — they've also essentially invented a new central ensemble, giving the characters dull interpersonal drama that feels especially inconsequential in the face of Earth's potential conquest from the stars.
The most engaging storyline in 3 Body Problem sticks closest to Liu's original conception. After witnessing the public execution of her university professor father, fellow physicist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) is forcibly recruited by the military to work at an isolated clandestine outpost with a purpose far greater than merely competing with other nations. In the early episodes, Ye's story alternates with the less compelling present-day scenes, as her actions decades ago bring about startling global consequences.
Tseng is fantastic as the stubborn, almost nihilistic young Ye, and Rosalind Chao plays the older, more subdued Ye with a quieter kind of authority. She's connected to a group of five Oxford-educated physicists, all of whom are drawn into a worldwide conspiracy related to the apparent breakdown of basic laws of physics. Theoretical physicist Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) is the closest that 3 Body Problem has to a protagonist, a smart and determined scientist who discovers a mysterious virtual reality game that tasks its players with saving a seemingly doomed world.
The plodding virtual reality scenes, which dominate the first half of the eight-episode season, are dreadful, with shockingly ugly special effects for a series with such a huge budget. The game itself is just an elaborate expository device, which gets dropped once the characters learn about what's really going on. Outside the game, Jin and her friends all eventually encounter the operatives of a secret agency dedicated to investigating the consequences of Ye's past decisions, including Benedict Wong as an amusingly grumpy former cop and Liam Cunningham as the agency's condescending, arrogant leader.
In addition to Cunningham, the cast includes fellow Game of Thrones alums John Bradley and Jonathan Pryce, both of whom are wasted in relatively small parts. Benioff, Weiss and Woo build a large cast of characters but fail to make any of them interesting, and while the creators barrel through plot elements from all three of Liu's books, they drag the show down with tiresome bickering among Jin and her increasingly irritating former classmates.
Liu's novels are known for their attention to scientific detail, and 3 Body Problem understandably tones much of that down for the Netflix audience. Yet what's left just comes off as a generic alien invasion story that takes itself way too seriously, with some strange, half-formed ideas at the edges. The acting is passable but never affecting, the scope feels limited, and the attempts at philosophical discourse are clumsy at best. Whatever captivated American readers when the novel was first translated into English in 2014 is barely evident in this ungainly, forgettable TV series. ♦
3 Body ProblemStarring Jess Hong, Benedict Wong, Liam Cunningham
