Review | Netflix drama review: 3 Body Problem – Game of Thrones creators adapt Liu Cixin’s sci-fi masterpiece for your latest dose of event television
- After the stunning success of the Game of Thrones franchise, its creators turn to Liu Cixin’s award-winning sci-fi novel The Three Body Problem
- The Netflix drama 3 Body Problem distils this and other parts of Liu’s epic trilogy about alien invasion, starting with events during the Cultural Revolution
4/5 stars
Following the gargantuan success of Game of Thrones, series creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss turn, for their next dose of event television, to one of the most extraordinary literary successes of the 21st century.
Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel The Three-Body Problem has been universally celebrated as one of the most innovative works of science fiction in a generation. After it was translated into English in 2012, it became the first Chinese novel to win science fiction’s prestigious Hugo Award for best novel.
A pair of sequels quickly followed to create what has become known as the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, the epic story of an advancing alien invasion and the efforts of Earth’s foremost scientists to thwart it.
Blending elements of history with advanced theoretical physics in a hugely ambitious thriller that pits science against politics and religion while delivering a searing allegory for humanity’s environmental responsibilities, it seems like a project tailor-made for the creative team that turned George R.R. Martin’s romping, still-incomplete fantasy saga into a cultural phenomenon.
Teaming this time with Netflix and showrunner Alexander Woo (True Blood), the creators of 3 Body Problem attempt to condense another expansive, mind-bending epic of fantastical literature into a mainstream media event.
Can Netflix sci-fi series 3 Body Problem match Game of Thrones’ success?
The story opens in Beijing circa 1966, as promising student Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) looks on in terror as her father is hauled before a violent mob of young protesters.
A renowned professor, Ye Zhetai is being reprimanded for teaching about the big-bang theory which identifies the beginning of time, thereby leaving space for the existence of God before that and going against the students’ revolutionary principles.
When he refuses to recant, Ye is brutally beaten to death before a baying crowd, and Wenjie is carted off to a labour camp. In this moment, an all-consuming disdain for humanity manifests within Wenjie, even when she is later saved and reassigned to a top secret scientific programme known only as Red Coast.
As these events play out, we simultaneously follow a string of bizarre suicides among prominent scientists in the present day – all of whom were plagued by inexplicable anomalies that appear to defy the laws of physics, as well as a shared obsession with a mysterious countdown.
Investigating these deaths is former MI5 operative Shi (Benedict Wong). When Dr Vera Ye, head of Oxford’s Particle Accelerator research programme, is next to take her own life, a group of young scientists, dubbed the “Oxford Five”, are drawn into the mystery.
These include Ye’s lab assistant Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), his on-off partner and nano-tech specialist Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), theoretical physicist Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), teacher Will Downing (Alex Sharp), and entrepreneur Jack Rooney (John Bradley).
Auggie begins seeing the countdown, a blur of sunspots in the centre of her vision, that won’t go away and are getting perilously close to zero. She also encounters a strange woman (Marlo Kelly) who seems to know far too much about what is happening.
At Vera’s funeral, the mysterious and exorbitantly wealthy Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce) makes a brief appearance, before disappearing in his helicopter. So too does Vera’s mother (Rosalind Chao), who hands Jin a strange, futuristic headset her daughter had been playing with before her death.
When Jin puts it on, she is transported into a hyperrealistic, totally immersive video game, set in a fantastical world orbited by three suns, causing a cataclysmic, unsolvable phenomenon known to physicists as a three-body problem.
There are so many intricately interwoven storylines in play that it is almost impossible to summarise 3 Body Problem effectively in a few brief paragraphs.
As for the elephant in the room: yes, a number of changes have been made to the gender, ethnicity and location of major characters. In Liu’s novels, the action took place almost entirely within China, involving predominantly Chinese characters.
While the backstory and inciting incidents are preserved, the present-day action has been changed, and key players now represent a far more international collective of collaborative minds. In doing so, the show reunites a number of familiar faces from Game of Thrones, including Liam Cunningham, Pryce and Bradley in substantial roles.
Inevitably, this will be a bone of contention for some fans, despite most of the changes being implemented solely to broaden the international appeal of the show.
It should be noted that Liu’s books have been adapted in China already. A television series premiered last year on Tencent Video, while a 3D live-action feature, directed by Zhang Fanfan, was completed but remains unreleased.
In this first season, 3 Body Problem incorporates plot lines that span all three of Liu’s novels, and raise profound questions about humanity’s inherent tribalism and self-destructive nature.
While not a slavishly faithful adaptation, the show captures the spirit of Liu’s writing, while setting in motion the unfeasibly grandiose space epic that is still to come.
If it also manages to turn a few inquisitive readers on to the work of one of today’s most prominent science fiction writers, then that can only be a good thing.
3 Body Problem will start streaming on Netflix on March 21.
