‘3 Body Problem’ is an addictive, epic sci-fi
A man is on a stage in front of a huge crowd of hecklers, who are screaming for blood. He is brought to his knees and pressured to renounce his beliefs. In the end, it’s an adolescent barely through puberty who kills him. The man’s daughter watches from the crowd and cries.
No, I’m not talking about the Season 1 scene from HBO’s “Game of Thrones” in which Ned Stark (Sean Bean) was killed, a sequence that helped launch the HBO fantasy series from successful to sensation back in 2011. I’m talking about the opening moments of Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” (now streaming), a sci-fi epic from “Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, along with “True Blood” and “The Terror” writer Alexander Woo. “Body” starts with a public execution and gets wilder (and weirder) from there.
Adapted from the Hugo Award-winning science fiction series “Remembrances of Earth’s Past” by Chinese author Liu Cixin, “Body” is the “Thrones” duo’s first big project from an expensive overall deal with Netflix. As you watch the thrilling, if dense, first season, it’s quickly apparent just why an adaptation of this material attracted Benioff and Weiss: it has dozens of characters, complex mythology and plotting, visceral violence, shocking deaths and at least one scene with random nudity. What’s not to love for the folks known for writing expository dialogue over sex scenes?
But “Thrones” comparisons aside, “Body” stands on its own as a huge achievement. Benioff, Weiss and Woo took a book trilogy known more for its thought experiments in philosophy and theoretical physics than its plot and made a solid bit of hard sci-fi that is (mostly) accessible to more casual fans of the genre. Its characters could use a little deepening, its science could use a little more explanation in layman’s terms (or, perhaps, third-grade terms) and some of the symbolism is a little heavy-handed. But overall, “Body” is that kind of addictive, high-concept drama that “Thrones” was at its best moments. “Body” doesn’t yet reach the heights of the Red Wedding, but there’s still a lot of story, and a lot of weird alien stuff, to get through.
The series simplifies and edits in adapting Liu’s long books, but it’s still a big, complicated story to keep up with.
It starts in 1966, during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China, where we meet Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), who goes on to suffer greater trauma even after she loses her father. After forced labor and imprisonment, she is eventually taken to a science station, where she’s tasked with searching for extraterrestrial life. When she makes contact, she invites the aliens to Earth, even though they’re hostile. She doesn’t have a very high opinion of humanity. Traveling as fast as they can through space, the race dubbed the “San-Ti” will make it to the planet in a short 400 or so years.
This backstory is intermingled with events in the present day, in which prominent scientists are murdered or dying by suicide around the world, as experiments in particle accelerators produce impossible results. When one former Oxford professor dies, her five most promising students reunite at her funeral and are soon pulled into the implausible goings-on.
Physicist Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and entrepreneur Jack Rooney (John Bradley, a “Thrones” alum) become obsessed with a way-too-realistic virtual reality game depicting life on another planet. Auggie Salazar (Eiza González) starts to see a menacing countdown on her vision, and is told by a mysterious stranger that if she doesn’t end her research on nanofibers she will be killed. Buddies Saul (Jovan Adepo) and Will (Alex Sharp) attempt normalcy amid the chaos. They’re all watched by investigator and government agent Da Shi (Benedict Wong) and his powerful superior Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham, another “Thrones” actor). Eventually, Ye’s aliens will come to their attention.
If that sounds like a lot, it is. And there’s more that won’t fit into this review. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment of the series is that it is more than halfway comprehensible without hundreds of pages of explication. Despite the frequent expository scenes, the series moves along at a nice clip. It’s bingeable if you want, but you may need some time between the eight episodes to digest the science lessons. Considering how cerebral the story is, and how theoretical all the alien stuff has to be, the creators do a good job of bringing visual interest to the story. They make liberal use of fantasy sequences, and not just in the virtual reality video game. A midseason massacre is one of the most disturbing (and disgusting) things I’ve seen on television, and I’ve watched “The Walking Dead.”
Some moments don’t quite work. About two-thirds of the way through, the story wanders too far into subplots. It takes a little too long (nearly two episodes) for the audience to really understand this is an alien invasion story and not just a globetrotting scientist version of “CSI.”
Despite its flaws, “Body” is just plain exciting. It feels new and different; unlike any other series on TV. And if you know anything about the plot of the books, things can only get stranger if the show returns for additional seasons.
And thankfully, for Benioff and Weiss, this time the author has finished writing all the books. I’m sure it’s a nice change.