‘3 object problem’
Creators: David Benioff, DB Weiss and Alexander Woo
Address: Derek Tsang, Andrew Stanton, Minkie Spiro
Distribution: Jess Hong, Eiza González, Jovan Adepo, John Bradley
Country: United Kingdom / United States / China
Duration: 60 minutes approx. (8 episodes)
Year: 2024
Gender: science fiction
Premiere: March 21, 2024 (Netflix)
★★★★
What can you do next as a television creator? ‘game of Thrones‘A series so great and often meaningful that it managed to bring fantasy even to segments of the population, or reward voters who previously had little interest? The cowardly option would be to de-escalate tensions, try the human tragedy, adopt a safe formula. Another, more kamikaze and interesting one, is adapting. ‘The Three-Body Problem’, a trilogy by Chinese author Cixin Liu It’s full of almost unfilmable ideas and images.
The tandem formed with the first series they created for Netflix, David Benioff And D. B. WeissSupported here by Chinese American Alexander Woo (“True Blood,” season two of “The Terror”), he looks set to hit the road transforming a cerebral sci-fi cathedral into a global pop obsession. As in the first book, the action begins in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution. Astrophysicist Ye Wenjie (currently Zine Tseng) are horrified witnesses to the murder of his father, a physics teacher, at the hands of the Red League during a wrestling match. We follow Wenjie on his familiar path: he is dragged into a labor brigade in Inner Mongolia, locked up for a time, and recruited for what appears to be a large-scale weapons research project. We see that you got it, it’s true. a particular decision that may reverberate for decades and even centuries to follow.
But most of the action takes place in modern-day London. Historical drama gives way to thriller before sci-fi begins to seep into the equation. Corresponds to Benedict Wong Take on the role of strategic intelligence agent Clarence Shi (Shi Qiang in the book) investigating an incident. A plague of suicides by scientists, especially in the field of Physics, a community that has recently changed due to the strange results produced by particle accelerators; Experiments that could override the known laws of the universe. Nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao, now a woman, plays Auggie Salazar. Eiza González. And he is also, in a sense, theoretical physics researcher Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), because he is the one who discovered here a specific virtual reality game This pushes the action in unusual directions.
Benioff, Weiss, and Woo remix some characters to their liking, add new ones, or introduce creations that don’t appear until the second and third into the first volume’s plot. They also change the tone of the books. Investing more consciously in humor or emotionality. Without leaving aside the concepts of science and physics, They’re looking for science fiction that’s a little less ‘hard’It has the capacity to capture the widest possible audience with an operation similar to the operation implemented by David S. Goyer when he transformed Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ epic into a ‘space opera’ full of emotion and adventure. Fans of the literary trilogy may need some time to accept the changes; The sooner they achieve this, the sooner they will be able to enjoy it happily. It’s bumpy at times, but it’s one of the most enjoyable journeys of all time on television..
Because the ‘3 Body Problem’ is still A drama that honors Cixin Liu’s unleashed imagination, with all the traumatic consequences this entails. While never quite forgetting the power of levity, its creators take seriously the existential threat at the heart of the action; We won’t explain it here to make the experience even more memorable. And they worry about putting into pictures many great inventions of the Chinese writer. virtual reality scenarios with dehydrated, rolled and rehydrated bodies, an impossible mission through the Panama Canal, or unimaginable means of omniscient access. So they’re trying to show us things we haven’t seen before.
When the filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (‘Dune’) recently declared that he hates dialogue, stating that dialogue is an essential tool of theater and television; For a long time, he seemed to have forgotten or ignored the visual power that TV series could offer. ‘3 Body Problem’ was very well directed Derek Tsang (2021 Oscar nominee ‘Better Days’), Andrew Stanton (‘WALL•E’) or Minkie Spiro (“Barry”) is a giant step forward in an evolution that has seemingly no limits.