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Review of the Three Body Problem on Netflix: Get rid of the feelings and give me the science
I notice that most males will forgive a pretty dumb plot in a movie if the action scenes are compelling. Likewise, many females are obsessed with bad Hallmark movies (particularly during Christmas time) because such movies appeal to feminine feelings even when the movie is utterly dull.
There are similar patterns of bias when it comes to science fiction. The genre is notoriously divisive as it tends to minimize character development to instead focus on how science effect society. This is especially the case with harder science fiction. In fact, science fiction fans often complain that mainstream critics just don’t appreciate science fiction.
After watching The Three Body Problem on Netflix, I realized that I was one of those science fiction fans. Throughout the series I felt myself wanting to yell at the screen, “Get rid of all those useless feelings and give me the aliens and the crazy science stuff.”
There is a love triangle and some drama with corporate greed and some sad sack gets cancer in the later parts of the first season and I just don’t care. The world is at stake, so unless you have a really interesting character arc, let me get back to the science and the aliens and the life-and-death struggle going on with all of the human race.
I like the politics in this movie. Firstly, this t.v. show has some of the most anti-Mao anticommunist scenes in any TV show. This is surprisingly brave for a Netflix show. The brutality and stupidity of Mao’s Cultural Revolution are unsparingly shown in the first two episodes.
The show also explores how humanity will react to the threat of an alien invasion which is very fascinating. Some fight and some despair and some worship the aliens as a new G-d. Watching it all play out reminds me of a good Star Trek episode.
Stand-out performances are Benedict Wong and Liam Cunningham. They are always funny and always drive the story forward. I note that the most masculine and aggressive of the male characters are constantly compelling to watch, but the effeminate and supportive men in the show are pretty dull.
Noticeably, my favorite female character is the most feminine female in the show. Maybe it’s just a personal bias or maybe shows are better when men are manly and women are feminine. I’ll let the viewer decide.
So all in all the Three Body Problem is a very mixed bag. I will watch the second season, but I wish they would cut the fat.
Published in General
Thanks for the Review!
“Come on, that is a great movie! And it starts in ten minutes!”
I like your review, Henry! I especially appreciate the humor and whimsy you included. Well done!
Right after the intro…
I concur, Henry. There is a good balance to be struck on these things. Take Arthur C. Clarke, for instance. I’ve read a couple of his novels and several of his short stories. Clarke was great at explaining science and technology, but his characters are one-dimensional. A book where I care nothing about the characters because they all have the personality of a manikin is not something I am going to re-read. In the novel Three Body Problem, I don’t recall much about the characters, so it was good that they were given personalities for the show. But I think the writers largely over-corrected and spent so much time on the personal drama that it distracts from the actual plot of the story.
Indeed. I’ll probably never see it, but it’s good to know why. :-)
I’m with you.
Indeed, this is a notoriously difficult dilemma: In mainstream fiction (lit’rachoor), every word is ideally supposed to advance character development. In science fiction, words must also advance development of the fictional world and the relevant science and technology. Thus, in a mainstream novel all the details of a scene, even (or especially?) the most trivial, are likely to give insights to the personalities and thoughts of the characters whereas in science fiction they are just as likely to be crafted to provide insight into the nature of the depicted society. Every writer chooses a personal balance of these goals and few writers are able to accomplish both at the highest level.
A famous throw-away example from one of Robert Heinlein’s stories:
In mainstream fiction, this could only suggest the narrator is in a very strange state of mind. But in the story, doors actually do iris open like the aperture of a camera.
Or from a famous story by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth:
Only a trickle? Is the protagonist living in a run-down tenement or does this again indicate something about his state of mind? And why say “fresh water”? But in fact the story takes place in a resource-strapped New York in which people have both fresh water and salt water taps.
In a novel by Gene Wolfe: Why is the sun always described as red? Is this a hint at the protagonist’s state of mind, or is the sun cooling as it dies? (The latter.)
Later in that same tetralogy:
This is a very poetic way to describe perilous solitude, but a few pages later we learn a second meaning which is just as important:
And so on.
As a matter of fact, most mainstream critics (including the most erudite literary scholars) have traditionally been unequipped to understand, much less to value and respect, such stories, as their training has been entirely in other (traditional) ways of reading. Only in recent decades has this begun to change somewhat. A writer once related how he laboriously went through a science fiction story, sentence by sentence, word by word, with an accomplished academic who was having difficulty making sense of what was supposed to be a good story. He discovered that the academic simply did not know how to read such a text to glean its intended meanings. Such problems are further exacerbated by the fact that nearly all of these scholars and critics know virtually nothing about science and technology, such that they simply cannot understand a phrase like “the monopole mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Epsilon Indi”.
Thanks. I am intrigued. I was also impressed that Cixin Liu was able to write and publish a work so directly, openly condemnatory of both Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Communism itself and not wind up in exile or in prison. His “Broken Stars” anthology (sorry, directly translating the German title of that book over there- I don’t know the title in English) was a mixed bag, I thought. Your review has me interested in his other works and this series.
Great science fiction has well-thought-out worlds and tech. In Dune the existence of a personal force field that could deflect fast-moving objects meant that being trained to use a knife at exactly the right speed was a key skill. (The movie kind of blew that off.) That tech twist meant a kind of return of personal combat in a high-tech age.
I hate gee whiz tech that should change the entire social fabric but somehow is just LA suburban culture with better communication devices and bad costumes. Thinking through the social and political effects of tech is job one for the sci-fi writer.
Well, that’s obviously cultural appropriation! They meant “Indian” but thought they could fool us!
If you want a lot of more science to your sci-fi, I would recommend reading the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. The writers distilled and watered down a lot of concepts into digestible scenes for a tv series. And for the most part, they’re effective. There are some expectedly dry info dumps in the books. But this world gets much much bigger in the next two books and so do the crazy concepts Cixiu Liu throws in. I look forward to the next few seasons because I’m curious if the show can still keep it up.
The best way I can describe the character work and relationship dynamic in the books is that they’re very Chinese. People are much colder and more distant. The way the main male character and the main female character are written in books 2 and 3 are also very non-Western. Their equivalents in the show are more in-line with Western leads. The biggest criticism I see online with the books is the characterization, but Liu actually gets better as he goes along here. But they’ll never be like conventional protagonists. It is interesting though that the best characters in the Netflix show are the ones closest to their book counterparts: Wade and Shi.
I think things are censored differently depending on the medium in China. There’s more leeway in books and I imagine they couldn’t have predicted that this book series would become so globally successful. Now that it is so popular, the Tencent TV adaptation is more censored, (and more people will watch something than read something). I love that there are two competing series over the same source material though, really highlights what China censors.
It is insanely irritating to open a page and have the loud flipping video start up.
Yes, I made a “complaint” on one of the V5 posts about that. YouTube behaves, but Dailymotion starts immediately. Seems like a bug.
Still going on
Flagged it.
But I guess no big deal that a webpage starts making noise. Makes me rude.
Thanks Ricochet!!
I think on most people’s browsers, the video was muted. But I removed the auto-playing video from kedavis’s comment and put in a link to the URL, so people can see it by clicking on it.
Thank you!!
I really enjoyed the series and literally about ten minutes ago finished the trilogy of books. Pretty incredible story; I get why the show writers condensed it and combined some of the story lines. By the end the trilogy covers literally billions of years. I think the end of book 2 is where they will end the series, if they can even make it that far.
Netflix is notorious for cancelling shows too early, but this has been a very successful first season for them. Given the amount of money Netflix dropped for season 1 and to essentially get these guys to adapt this series, Netflix may not pull their usual move. The showrunners have said they plan to adapt the 3 books over 4 seasons. Hopefully they get that chance.
They appear to have replaced the Luo Gi character with Saul, and while the story line with the probe is there I wonder how they can possibly show all the Chang Xie timeline. It will take some very writing to capture the span of the books.
Still waiting for a decent adaptation of Heinlein’s magnificent “Starship Troopers.”
Helldivers is a good parody
I think it’s doable. The 3 books have some storylines that occur in parallel time-wise, so the show is adapting the story as a whole instead of book by book. We’ve already seen stuff from books 2 and 3 in season 1. So we’ll likely see parallel storylines of Luo Ji/Cheng Xin from books 2 and 3 through Saul/Jin in season 2. I’m a fan of the book series, but Cixin Liu throws in too many ideas, especially in book 3. A great adaptation should be able to condense or drop some of the meandering plot lines and characters. Seasons 1-4 of Game of Thrones was so tight and such a masterful adaptation because these guys were able to do this. I wouldn’t say 3BP is of the same quality so far, but if they can improve the character work and decrease the melodrama in future seasons, it has soooo much potential.