3 Body Problem
Netflix’s sci-fi spectacular that you won’t mind getting Lost in
Offering plenty of thought-provoking, mind-bending conceits, this is not exactly casual viewing, but it’s a show that rewards close attention, writes James Croot.
Forget Asimov’s Foundation, Collins’ Hunger Games and Roth’s Divergent, the literary sci-fi triptych many believe is the greatest of all time has finally made it to a screen near you.
Acclaimed by no less than the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, as “wildly imaginative” and “really interesting”, as well as receiving a glowing endorsement from Game of Thrones’ creator George R.R. Martin, Chinese author Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past: The Three-Body Trilogy first wowed readers in his homeland in the late noughties, before English translations debuted around a decade ago, quickly followed by the trilogy earning a string of prestigious international awards.
While a 3-D movie adaptation was rushed into production in 2015, the fourmonth shoot never made it out of the editing room.
Fast-forward half a decade and with the small-screen global streaming era seemingly firmly established, not one, but two, rival projects were commissioned.
China’s Tencent delivered its 30-episode take of the entire trilogy at the start of last year, to much admiration in the People’s Republic, although The New York Times’ Mike Hale dismissed its screenplay and cast as “mediocre”.
It recently began airing in the US, but currently shows no sign of washing up on our shores. Which leaves Kiwi audiences to discover this complex, science-heavy, dual-time-period tale via Netflix’s lavish-looking eight-part take on the first book, The Three-Body Problem (with some elements of the two follow-ups), restylised as 3 Body Problem.
Created by Game of Thrones duo D.B. Weiss and David Benioff and True Blood’s Alexander Woo (who say they have ambitious plans to cover off the entire trilogy across four seasons), the initial episodes feel like a cross between Lost, Arrival and V (along with a soupcon of The Tripods), as we slowly learn how the revolutionary approach by brilliant, young dissident Chinese scientist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) to amplifying the country’s attempts to send a message into outer space in the late 1960s is linked to terrifying events in 2024.
Pegged as favourite for the next Nobel Prize, Karachi-based cosmologist and theoretical physicist Dr Sadiq Muhammed has become the latest highprofile scientist to have taken his own life in strange and horrifying circumstances. It’s also a month since particle accelerators across the globe started generating results that make no sense.
“Every component of every collider, from here to Beijing, has been checked four times over,” Oxford University’s Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) laments, adding that their experiments “are supposed to teach us how the universe works … that’s Alice in Wonderland”, as he shows a colleague a picture that suggests that “all the physics of the past 60 years is wrong”.
Unable to justify using “enough electricity to power a small town” to produce “nonsense”, his Oxford project is being shut down at midnight. However, he never expected his boss Vera Ye (Vedette Lim) to jump into the accelerator before the lights go out.
That news also comes as a shock to mutual friends Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and Auggie Salazar (Eiza Gonzalez).
While the former goes to comfort Vera’s Chinese-born mother (Rosalind Chao) and discovers a strange VR headset, the latter suddenly finds her vision obscured by what appears to be a countdown clock. Increasingly frightened by what might happen when it reaches zero in less than 48 hours, Auggie is approached by a mysterious woman who advises her that the only way to stop it is to abandon her groundbreaking nanofibre research and development.
If it all sounds like quite a lot to get your head around, it is – especially when you add in the investigations by Benedict Wong’s (Doctor Strange) former Scotland Yard and MI5 operative Clarence into the dwindling number of cutting-edge scientists at the behest of his shadowy boss Thomas Wade (Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham), plus Oxford duo Game of Thrones’ John Bradley’s cynical Jack and Alex Sharp’s (One Life) cancer-threatened Will and the looming figure of oil magnate Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce).
However, the visual effects are both immersive and top-notch, the worldbuilding (and destroying) impressive and the storytelling more than enough to hook you within the first quarter of an hour.
The cast boasts the right mix of recognisability and lack of baggage, with Alita: Battle Angel’s Gonzalez, Wong and, delightfully, Toi Whakaari graduate and Inked actor Hong the early standouts.
Offering plenty of thought-provoking and mind-bending conceits (as well as timely meditations on humanity’s impact on the environment and the seemingly re-escalating “battle” between science and religion), 3 Body is not exactly casual viewing, but it’s a show that rewards close attention.
And a look at an executive-producing line-up that includes Brad Pitt, Rosamund Pike and Rian Johnson (Poker Face, Knives Out) gives you a feeling that there’s a desire for this to be as great as it can possibly be.
3 Body Problem is available to stream on Netflix.