Before a rushed ending soured the “Game of Thrones” fanbase on showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the duo had rightfully earned popularity of wrangling a seemingly unadaptable series of books right into a rattling good adaptation. Creator and screenwriter George R.R. Martin had written “A Song of Ice and Fire” as a partial response to the strictures of TV, crafting a story with the sprawling ensemble, major battles, sex, violence and abrupt demises he couldn’t work into scripts for the likes of NBC and CBS. The book series kicked off in 1996, just a couple of years before the rise of premium cable culture drivers would make television more friendly to artistic ambition and fewer subject to the FCC. Aided by a stellar solid and powerful support from HBO, Benioff and Weiss nonetheless did exceptional work translating Martin’s vision right into a nuanced drama with a deep bench of antiheroes and competing points of view. Before “Game of Thrones” was a juggernaut and, eventually, a disappointment, it was a sensible, considered, and palpably affectionate tackle its source material.
For his or her next big swing, the producers have teamed up with “True Blood” alumnus Alexander Woo to tackle a good steeper challenge. The Chinese science fiction trilogy “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” spans tons of of years, mostly unconnected characters and several other multi-page exegeses on the ABCs of particle physics. To show author Cixin Liu’s creation right into a Netflix series, the team would need to do greater than marshal resources or re-earn the trust of those burnt by how “Game of Thrones” limped across the finish line. This adaptation demands re-conceiving large chunks of plot from the ground-up while retaining Liu’s themes, not to say visualizing concepts with less precedent onscreen than the fantasy tropes Martin deployed and subverted. The result shows a few of the strain of this Herculean task, but in addition proves the early seasons of “Thrones” were neither a fluke nor a testament to Martin alone. Benioff and Weiss remain master adaptors, and along with Woo, they’ve opened an accessible entry point right into a deeply esoteric story while rendering the motion in a suitably epic scope.
“The Three Body Problem” and “3 Body Problem” — the title of Liu’s first volume altered enough to distinguish book from show, though not enough to avoid confusion — start in the identical time and place. Because the Cultural Revolution tears through China, young scientist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) watches a mob beat her father to death in an anti-intellectual frenzy. The scene sets up one in every of the saga’s strongest ideas: that a superb mind could grow so disillusioned with humankind they could turn their allegiance elsewhere, convinced our species is beyond hope of guiding its own destiny.
Ye’s radicalization, which takes root at a mysterious military base, is interspersed as flashbacks throughout the eight-part season’s early episodes. Most of “3 Body Problem” takes place in the current day, when investigator Da Shi (Benedict Wong) looks right into a string of apparent suicides by high-profile researchers across the globe. The funeral of 1 Oxford scholar reunites five former classmates who will go on to play an outsized role in what seems to be a slow-motion global catastrophe: physicists Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo); materials scientist Auggie Salazar (Eiza Gonzalez); wealthy entrepreneur Jack Rooney (John Bradley); and the ailing Will Downing (Alex Sharp). An older Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) is there, too, though it’s initially unclear how she arrived within the U.K. or spent the intervening years.
Lots of these characters are invented, blended together or substantially altered for the sake of a streamlined narrative. It does strain credulity that a conflict with these stakes would occur to rest on a small group of friends — but as “3 Body Problem” unfolds, that’s one in every of the least unbelievable elements of an increasingly outlandish plot. In exchange for some slight raising of the eyebrows, “3 Body Problem” gets a core solid who act as anchors to a quite literally high-flying tale of humanity’s survival. By the finale, cryogenic freezing and nuclear-powered space travel have been casually introduced to the equation; before we get there, we situate ourselves in Jack’s boyish hedonism, Saul’s cynical streak and Will’s unrequited crush on Jin. “3 Body Problem” is TV now, and TV needs a compact set of interdependent actors akin to a workplace or a family unit. Only Jin’s boyfriend Raj (Saamer Usmani), an officer within the Royal Navy, feels truly peripheral. Their relationship seems practically nonexistent, coming off as a clumsy approach to introduce a player who quickly breaks off on his own journey.
After their mentor’s death, each Oxford alumnus finds themselves drawn into the continued intrigue. Auggie starts seeing an ominous countdown wherever she looks, a hallucination that seems connected to her research into nanofibers. Jin and Jack get sent copies of the identical futuristic headset Da Shi keeps finding at crime scenes. It’s an ultra-advanced VR game, one which comprises eye-popping imagery from the series premiere’s director Derek Tsang and his colleagues, including “Thrones” stalwart Jeremy Podeswa. Charged with saving a civilization from an unpredictable set of cataclysms — Jin’s game is about in imperial China, Jack’s medieval England — the player commands a reality with an uncanny mixture of historical detail and computer-aided effects. NPCs “dehydrate” themselves into flat husks to attend out extreme weather events, or suffer with horrifying verisimilitude in the event that they don’t achieve this in time. There’s a way of urgency to the sport, which offers clues to the motivations of those that built and distributed it.
The actual three-body problem is a riddle of physics, which may’t consistently predict the motion of three masses in one another’s orbit, whether molecules or planets. The sport is one approach to illustrate such wonky, cerebral ideas, a trick “3 Body Problem” consistently pulls off. Later, a substance invisible to the human eye drives a wide ranging motion sequence where the lack to see the reason behind such chaos only fuels our terror and awe. The moment all of Earth comes face-to-face with the extraterrestrial force behind the sport, the dead scientists and Augie’s visions, it’s depicted with trippy visuals that merge “Inception” with “The War of the Worlds.” At the identical time that “3 Body Problem” grounds its story in a crew of curious young people, the show also imbues a way of geeky grandeur.
Benioff, Weiss and Woo aren’t at all times in a position to bridge the divide between these two poles. It will possibly be jarring to listen to characters in a recognizably contemporary setting discuss constructing a spaceship factory on the moon. (Despite the aforementioned scenes, a few of the most out-there elements of “3 Body Problem” are described somewhat than shown.) “Thrones” composer Ramin Djawadi contributes an eerie, entrancing theme, but his rating has to share space with a pop soundtrack with songs which might be sometimes distractingly on-the-nose of their efforts to elucidate the show’s events in vernacular terms. One suspects that Liu’s world is so abstract that even the very best adaptation possible might be difficult for some viewers to completely wrap their heads around, a hurdle that may only grow higher because the series continues.
Nevertheless, “3 Body Problem” feels impressively near that ideal — and never all of its accomplishments are on account of structural decisions or feats of filmmaking. A stoic, forceful Chao delivers a stirring portrait of fanaticism curdled into regret; among the many younger solid, Hong projects intellect and emotion in equal measure. “3 Body Problem” is ultimately about an asymmetrical war that pits humankind against adversaries we are able to neither see nor understand. All of the more necessary, then, to make one side of the exchange indelible enough to hold a show on their very own.
“3 Body Problem” premiered at SXSW on March 8. All eight episodes of “3 Body Problem” might be available to stream on Netflix on March 21.
