For years, fans of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series believed the books simply couldn’t be adapted to the screen. There were too many characters, spread across multiple continents, in stories that would take years to intersect. And much of the plot was inspired by events that took place decades, if not centuries, before the contemporary action. It was an impossible task, everyone assumed. No one could do that.
Then David Benioff and D.B. Weiss actually did it. HBO’s Game of Thrones was a global smash, made on an epic scale that no one had ever imagined TV could achieve. Benioff and Weiss had to streamline Martin’s sprawling narrative here and there, but for the most part were able to satisfy both readers and on-readers — until, at least, the bumpy last two seasons, and the disastrous series finale, which some have blamed on creative burnout and others on the showrunners no longer having Martin’s books to refer to(*).
(*) I lean more towards burnout, in part because Martin told his colleagues much of what he had planned in the two still-unfinished concluding novels. While some story beats couldn’t be justified at any length — “Who has a better story than Bran the Broken?” — a lot of the endgame’s problem stemmed from squeezing various plot and character arcs into abbreviated seasons. Worse, Benioff and Weiss have said that their preference was to not make those seasons at all, but to wrap things up in a trio of movies, which would have given them even less time to make it all make sense.
You couldn’t blame Benioff and Weiss for wanting to take on an easier challenge with their next series. Instead, they’re once again — this time collaborating with Alexander Woo — trying to adapt the seemingly unadaptable with Netflix‘s 3 Body Problem, a sprawling sci-fi epic based on the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Chinese author Cixin Liu, about humanity preparing for the arrival of a hostile extraterrestrial force. I’ve only read the first novel, The Three-Body Problem, and it is the hardest of hard sci-fi: heavy on theory, meandering in plot, all but nonexistent in characterization. Large swaths of it take place inside a virtual reality game where players visit different eras of human history in an attempt to solve an astrophysics problem. The book bounces back and forth between the present and the aftermath of China’s Cultural Revolution; Wang Miao, the protagonist of the novel’s modern section, barely even qualifies as having two dimensions. The books are a worldwide sensation, but nobody’s reading them for the characters, when characters are almost always what gets audiences hooked on ongoing TV shows. For all the dragon attacks and ice zombie hordes, would anyone have cared about Game of Thrones if they weren’t already invested in Arya Stark, Tyrion Lannister, and so many other vivid figures Benioff and Weiss were gifted by George R.R. Martin?
The best thing I can say about 3 Body Problem is that it is a very, very smart piece of adaptation. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo (a longtime writer on True Blood and the creator of AMC’s gripping horror anthology The Terror) have done everything they can to blend the big ideas from the books with people who have clear personalities and inner lives, rather than ones who exist entirely as plot functionaries. But even with these various smart deviations from the source material, the show’s first season is middling drama at best. And while the interplanetary spectacle is meant to be grand, little of it comes close to replicating the awe we felt even at something as relatively simple as Cersei blowing up all her enemies at the Great Sept of Baelor.
Benedict Wong in ‘3 Body Problem.’
COURTESY OF NETFLIX
Where the book is an incredibly Chinese story, the show splits its time between China and England(*). The story still begins with the Cultural Revolution, with an opening scene — taken straight from the book — that couldn’t be more reminiscent of the death of Ned Stark, as young astrophysicist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) is horrified to watch her professor father be killed on a stage in front of a bloodthirsty mob. As we watch Wenjie’s life in the aftermath of this tragedy — and her exile to the rural wilderness for espousing the tenets of Western science — we also see how the ripple effects of her work manifest in 21st century London.
(*) Though several of the actors are either from China or of Chinese descent, the shift in geographic orientation will be stark to anyone who’s read the books. At one point, one of the Chinese-British characters is asked about an old Sun Tzu saying; he shrugs and says, “I don’t know. I’m from Manchester.”
The showrunners have essentially split Wang Miao into multiple characters, all part of a friend group who met as students at Oxford. Saul (Jovan Adepo) is the underachieving genius, still working as a research assistant because he’d rather get high and sleep around than take advantage of an intellect that even his brilliant pals seem intimidated by. Auggie (Eiza González) is an engineering prodigy on the verge of a huge breakthrough in nanofiber technology. Jin (Jess Hong) is an inquisitive physicist, Jack (Game of Thrones alum John Bradley) has made a fortune using his science background to develop a snacks company, and Will (Alex Sharp) feels embarrassed to be teaching science to high schoolers. There are various pieces of interpersonal conflict — Will has long nursed a crush on Jin, while Saul and Auggie have hooked up repeatedly over the years — that creates added complications as each of them gradually learns about the very slow-moving alien invasion. At first, they’re being secretly surveilled by ex-cop Clarence (Benedict Wong) and the mysterious fixer Wade (Liam Cunningham, another Thrones vet). But in time, all of them get involved in the aftermath of Ye Wenjie’s actions, with a conspiracy in the present that includes reclusive billionaire Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce, also from Thrones) and the enigmatic but dangerous Tatiana (Marlo Kelly).
(L to R) Eiza González, Jess Hong, Saamer Usmani, Jovan Adepo, and Alex Sharp in ‘3 Body Problem.’
ED MILLER/NETFLIX
None of these characters have the depth or vibrancy of almost anyone from Westeros (or many of the sailors trapped in the ice on The Terror), but all of them feel like actual people, and are played by an excellent ensemble. Simply injecting a small amount of humanity into the story works wonders throughout. There’s still a fair amount of time spent inside the VR game, for instance, but those scenes are much less tedious here, because Jin is the primary player, and Jess Hong makes palpable the pleasure Jin takes at being inside this bizarre virtual construct. (In addition, Jack eventually gets to join her, and John Bradley is good for a welcome amount of comic relief.) Clarence and Wade, meanwhile, could exist entirely to move the story along — especially since each of them possesses a level of authority that seems to transcend all barriers of nation or class — but Wong and Cunningham find ways to make each of them feel like they existed long before they got thrust into these roles.
No matter how much the creators spruce up the edges, though, they can’t do much with the abstraction at the heart of the story. The aliens, we are repeatedly told, are about 450 years away, by which point everyone currently on planet Earth, and any children, grandchildren, or great grandchildren they might have, will be long dead. (Well, almost everyone; this is science fiction, after all, and there are ways for people to still be around long after they should be six feet under.) Various characters wonder why anyone should care about something that won’t affect them or anyone they might ever care about, while others like Wade insist they owe it to future generations, even that far into the future. You can read it as a metaphor for climate change, especially since Ye Wenjie finds great inspiration in Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book about the damage that humanity is doing to the natural world. But as a work of dramatic fiction, 3 Body Problem never makes a compelling enough argument for why its central quintet would be invested in this — and, thus, why the audience should be.
So with decent but not riveting characters, and a dry main plot, that leaves spectacle as the last thing 3 Body Problem can potentially hang its hat on. There’s some here, just not enough — and not all of it as effective as it should be. There’s a stunning action sequence midway through the season where we see Auggie’s nanofibers put to a use for which they weren’t designed, and some other memorable images like a flock of birds flying to their deaths into a Chinese radio telescope. But a lot of the grand scenes, like 30 million Chinese soldiers moving in unison as part of the VR game, are more exciting in conception than in how they actually look.
At one point, one of the members of the conspiracy is surprised to realize that the aliens don’t understand the concept of lying. He attempts to connect it to fiction, only to realize they also don’t understand storytelling. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo all have a very clear understanding of storytelling. There’s just only so much they can do to find a way to make this particular story interesting in their medium of choice.
All eight episodes of 3 Body Problem begin streaming on Netflix on March 21. I’ve seen the whole season.
