Do yourself a favor: do not waste your time with the Benioff/Weiss dog-turd that is 3 Body Problem, and watch the Chinese Three-Body instead.
Reasons? There are many.
- The Netflix show is eight hours long. The Chinese Three-Body is a thirty hour series. Needless to say, the pacing is completely different.
- Thirty years ago, people wouldn’t watch anything with subtitles… today, y’all watch shit in English with the captions running. So the language barrier is no impediment.
- There are long stretches of dialog in T-B that are taken word-for-word from the book, while 3BP seems only tangentially aware that the book exists.
- T-B takes only one significant departure from the structure of the book, but it’s a harmless one that just makes it a little more mysterious from the start. 3BP, meanwhile, splits the main character into five, and runs away in a panic every time the story asks the audience to care about science.
- Seriously, Netflix, not everything has to be rewritten to be multicultural. The Three-Body Problem —the book— is a Chinese story about Chinese scientists and Chinese politics, and that’s the show I want to see.
- What makes TT-BP so compelling is that it’s plausible. Scientists think like scientists, cops think like cops, and apocalyptic cultists think like apocalyptic cultists. And most of that makes it into T-B. As opposed to 3BP, where motivations aren’t so much opaque as non-existent, and the characters only do whatever will most efficiently get us to the next scene.
- I’ll grant you, if T-B were an American production, it would feel like it was made in 2010… it’s all Dutch angles, rapid cuts, and skittering camera work. But it’s set in 2007, so who cares?
- If you want to understand how differently these productions approach the source material, just look at the cosmic microwave background scene. Observe as Wang Miao in T-B frantically pours over dot-matrix print outs of satellite data with deepening horror, while the entire world of 3BP just walks outside, looks up, and goes “that’s peculiar”. You can practically feel Benioff and Weiss wanting to just write it all off to space dragons or something and move on to the next cool visual.
- Speaking of dragons, T-B is 100% free of any remnants of the cast of Game of Thrones… I didn’t realize this before, but I never want to think about Samwell Tarley again.
