Roush Review: Slow-Burning Sci-Fi in ‘3 Body Problem’
Review
3 Body Problem
The Aliens are coming. The Aliens are coming.
But they’ll be a long time coming. (And here we thought Invasion on Apple TV+ was a slow burn.) So it’s best to exercise patience while wading through the labyrinth of visionary science fiction, incidental mystery, sluggish soap opera, and existential dread that embodies 3 Body Problem, an ambitious attempt to make Liu Cixin’s acclaimed sci-fi trilogy come to life.
This series may be getting extra scrutiny because it’s the latest project of literary adaptation by Game of Thrones’ executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (working with The Terror: Infamy’s Alexander Woo). They’ve taken their knocks over how they ended their treatment of George R.R. Martin’s still incomplete fantasy saga—somebody had to do it—but in this case, they deserve credit for making the story more accessible and linear than the discursive, sometimes impenetrable original text. This considerably more multicultural version is still a bit of a ponderous muddle, though less opaque. For better and sometimes for worse.
The series opens amid the tumult of the Cultural Revolution in Communist China in the 1960s, an oppressive pushback against science that leads a grieving young astrophysics whiz, Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng, Rosalind Chao as an adult), to reject humanity and open a Pandora’s box that will have fateful consequences decades—and ultimately centuries—later. Flash-forward to contemporary London, where a wry investigator (Benedict Wong, excellent) is tracking the mysterious suicides of top scientists, each somehow convinced “science is broken.”
In the boldest though not best departure from the source material, we’re introduced to a group of young and deeply uninteresting brainiacs known as the “Oxford Five,” who are similarly rocked by anomalies that cast everything they know about physics into question. For nanotech innovator Auggie (Eiza González), this dislocation takes the form of a visible countdown—to what, we’re not sure—that only she can see. (The special effect is one of many that reads better on the page than on screen.) The implication being that someone, or something, is targeting the world of science and its most notable practitioners.
Adding to the mystery: a bizarre futuristic VR helmet that plunges the user into a remote universe beset by the instability of three orbiting suns (the titular “3 Body Problem”). These world-crumbling odysseys are meant to be mind-blowing, with users in various period garb adopting iconic avatar personalities like Copernicus, but just as with many video games, they rarely go beyond the bemusing.
Once the stakes for the human race and Earth’s eventual invaders become clear, 3 Body Problem develops an “Oxford Five” problem, by continually putting these blokes in the middle of each twist and set piece, with turgid hand-wringing and tearful subplots. As if the existential angst weren’t already enough. More vivid characterizations are provided by Game of Thrones alums Jonathan Pryce (as a zealous environmentalist living aboard a retrofitted oil tanker dubbed “Judgment Day”) and Liam Cunningham (as a murky global puppet master), though they primarily exist as colorful adversaries moving the plot along.
I kept hearing Humphrey Bogart from Casablanca, declaring, “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three (or five) little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Here’s looking at the stars, kid. See you in about 400 years.
3 Body Problem, Series Premiere (eight episodes), Thursday, March 21, Netflix
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