Good science fiction unsettles and astounds, makes us reflect on our own world in all its flaws. There’s reflection aplenty in 3 Body Problem, which pits humanity against a future alien foe but stays centred on decidedly earthbound concerns for much of its runtime.
Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, working with Alexander Woo, have adapted another work of popular fiction; but rather than another work of high fantasy, this time they’ve opted for a 2008 science fiction novel by Liu Cixin, which was originally serialised in China.
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The eight-episode Netflix series weaves together happenings in the lives of a dozen or so major characters. In 1960s China, the daughter of a brilliant scientist comes to work at a secretive base sending messages into space. In the modern day, science has gone wonky; multiple scientists are dying by suicide, and all the stars in the sky flash on and off one night in Morse code. Behind it all is a race of aliens 400 years away from arriving on earth but already able to wreak such havoc locally due to the aliens’ exceptionally advanced technology. “All the physics of the past 60 years is wrong. Science is broken.”
3 Body Problem is a thriller mystery in many ways. The show’s bloody beginning gives way to an exploration of themes of religious belief; extra-terrestrial omnipotence; life, death and the end of everything. It also dabbles in humour; a virtual reality game subplot – which places some of the characters in faux-historical settings, such as Tudor England and Kublai Khan’s Shangdu, and features fictional versions of characters such as Isaac Newton and Sir Thomas More – contains some sequences that are among the series’ lightest, and others that are among the most horrifying.
More than a few Game of Thrones alumni join Benioff and Weiss (think John Bradley, Conleth Hill, Mark Gatiss – even Ramin Djawadi pops in to compose the score) but they are joined by a line up of other solid talent. Zine Tseng is particularly good as a young Ye Wenjie, the woman who first invites the aliens to earth, as is Jess Hong as the genius young physicist Jin Cheng, while Benedict Wong conveys wearied gravitas and snark in equal parts as the brooding detective Clarence Shi.
Liam Cunningham’s Thomas Wade, Clarence’s boss, is delightfully sardonic, while Jonathan Pryce, as an American doomsday cult leader communicating with the alien race, puts on a sincerely charming smile even as he chillingly discusses the coming alien apocalypse.
Meanwhile, certain scenes become quite laborious and emotionally overwrought. Indeed the pace slows in parts and, considering where the characters and plot end up at the end of episode four, you’d be forgiven for wondering by that point how much steam is left to cover the show until the end; but then along comes the events of episode five, which are astounding in the way they remove one key character from the board and propel those who are left in new directions.
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3 Body Problem has faced criticism of whitewashing, with many characters who were Chinese in the novel here cast by non-Chinese actors. At best it’s an “internationalisation” of a story for a new audience; at worst it’s an erasure of culture and a reduction of storytelling weight.
With the mostly positive reception to this first season, though, a second run of episodes should more or less be confirmed; certainly, with two more books in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy there’s enough material to continue – the aliens are still on their way.
3 Body Problem is now streaming on Netflix.
