#the three body problem netflix

[orangepeelshortbreadcookies]

On episode 2 of Netflix's Three-Body-Problem, and it might be just me, but Eiza Gonzalez is like the least convincing scientist. I suspect they might be going for a Hedy Lamarr vibe with her role, but damn they should have tried harder. Hopefully it gets better.

On the other hand, I adore/detest Wenjie. There has never been such a character to character. Red Coast stays consistently the most compelling storyline from pages to screen. You go girl! Do some cosmic war crimes! Go take your insurmountable trauma and make it everyone else's problem, literally. Your daughter's blood is on your hands because intergenerational, intergalactic trauma, uwu. You would die with that guilt. We love to see it.

[plasticfangtastic]

cant talk about the books at all but is the 3 body problem tv show just a bunch of scientist being cringey saying "SCIENCE!!" every 5 seconds, and spouting big words back and forth while the female charcthers look at all the other male scientist (bcuz is only dudes acting like this) and get mad that they r ignored by bcuz i guess 'vagina is inept' despite she qualifying to partake in this nerdy sword art online game and never being allowed to actually make her next move in the game.

[todayontumblr]

Thursday, March 28.

3 Body Problem *spoilers*

There are pickles, snags, muddles, and problems. Then there are problems concerning three bodies. This would be the latter. 

But problems, three-body or otherwise, can escalate into full-blown conundrums. And that is just what we have for you this Thursday, March 28, in the form of these Spotlight interviews with Zine Tseng and Rosalind Chao, and John Bradley and Alex Sharp, all four of 3 Body Problem fame, who were subject to a myriad of tough questions. The dark forest theory? Could Jason Momoa solve the #3 body problem? Ways that the first season does not end? And what would the ideal three-course meal one could put together to pair with a viewing of 3 Body Problem?

[electricsoul-rpg]

Netflix's 3 Body Problem

I tried watching Netflix’s American adaptation of Three Body problem. I watched five episodes and boy, is it painful.

(Full disclaimer: I really liked the Chinese adaptation by Tencent, I read the book after I watched the drama, and I am a European of Chinese descent, so I am definitely biased.)

The general whitewashing and westernization of the story is already pretty bad. Why take a Chinese story if you’re going to make it so blandly American?

Everyone is horny and thinks about sex, relationships based on ideals are reduced to attraction and sex. Everyone is so vulgar and crass. IQ seems very low.

Ye Wenjie. What did they do to Ye Wenjie. She’s a brainless horny fanatic woman now. And Shen Yufei is replaced by a generic unhinged lady. All the scientists seem supremely dumb.

White characters explain or emphasize things in Chinese, for Chinese people, when their Mandarin is bad. Not gibberish bad, but still pretty bad. Please just use English, your white actors clearly can’t speak Chinese. Your Chinese characters can understand and speak English. Don’t hurt our ears like this. It might be cool and exotic for the average Western audience who doesn't understand Mandarin but it’s cringe and painful for us.

A small thing but since I lost my father a few months ago, it struck me pretty hard. What was that altar in Clarence Shi’s house? Just two big pricey candles and one stick of incense? This is so cold and lifeless. Where is the FOOD??? The drinks??? The flowers/plants??? You're calling your wife and you're leaving her starving and depressed!

(For info, a normal small home ancestor altar should look more like this. As you can see : FOOD. Take care of your ancestors!)

The cast and setting is supposed to make this adaptation more "international"...but two British dudes decide everything when, in the novel and the Chinese adaptation, it is truly an international decision and an example of global cooperation. Five Oxford alumni of different skin color does not make this more international!

And so so so so many more things that are wrong. I feel like there is not a single Chinese brain cell in this.

All in all, I did not expect anything good, but I am still disappointed. It is so bland. No build-up. No mystery. No menace. No ambiance. Nothing. Everything is said straight to your face. They must think the audience is stupid, I guess.

Watch the Chinese adaptation

Did you like the ideas behind the Three Body Problem, either the book or the Netflix series? Are you ok with reading subtitles and watching something not in your language? Are you ok with seeing something set in another culture, with another culture's codes, not simplified and westernized for your sake? Are you ok with not being able to binge-watch it in one weekend? Are you ok with more complex characters, a slower-paced plot? Then try the Chinese adaptation. It's on Youtube and Viki, with subtitles. Legal and free.

[diamantdog]

three-body out of context (x)

[lovefrombegonia]

Ye Wengjie's reply to Trisolarans in different versions of the three-body problem saga:

⚠️ [SPOILER ALERT] ⚠️

Netflix:

"Come. We cannot save ourselves. I will help you conquer this world."

Book and Cdrama:

"Come here. I will help you conquer this world. Our civilization is no longer capable of solving its own issues. We need your force to intervene."

[avelera]

So I've been watching Three Body Problem with my partner and we just got to Episode 5. It has (spoilers) a pretty gruesome scene in it from the book, very bloody. I literally didn't watch it, just listened and watched my partner's (shocked) face throughout it.

This got me thinking. Not so much about Three Body Problem, because I haven't finished it yet nor read the books so I haven't really formed any sort of opinion on the show or the overall story, but more on Benioff and Weiss.

While looking away from That Scene I was curious if it was even in the book, so I was looking that up instead of watching. It was, but sure enough, Benioff and Weiss had embellished it.

I'll discuss it in more detail beneath the cut to avoid spoilers but suffice to say this is my take away:

For Benioff and Weiss, it's always been about cruelty. The chance to show cruelty above and beyond the source material, using the source material only as a spring board to delve into horrific imagery, is literally what attracts them to the stories they choose to depict.

And I felt like I'm taking crazy pills when I pointed this out all through the Game of Thrones era, not so much no one was figuring it out but because it felt like no one in the mainstream media was talking about it. They'd get asked these deep artistic questions about a certain scene (like the quote below which has spoilers) and it would be asked completely seriously and they'd give this answer like, "Oh we didn't want to show all that gore but we had no choice."

And I'm just sitting their flabbergasted like... what the fuck are you talking about, just admit that's what you wanted to depict?? That's what gave you a boner to tell this particular story??

Let me be clear, an artist choosing to depict gore and cruelty isn't a problem. I'm not a horror fan but it's not like I think horror shouldn't exist, or gore, or horrifying scenes that shock us to our marrow. That's very much a thing art can and should do!

I just feel like I'm fucking crazy because Benioff and Weiss and the people interviewing them never seem to get that this is their story kink. They always put this like... veneer of genteel shock and respectability over their questions about the cruel and gorey scenes they depict, like it just happened that way, when it's really really clear this is the stuff they like showing the most.

Benioff and Weiss's Game of Thrones was literally more gorey, graphic, and dehumanizing in places than the actual book. Where they departed from the books was, more often than not, to make things more abjectly cruel, dehumanizing, and shocking towards the characters. That's what they like doing as creators.

So this scene in Three Body Problem...

(SPOILERS)

... Where the ship gets slashed to ribbons and little children are literally shredded apparently isn't even depicted in the book.

"“We wanted to show it, we didn’t want to evade it,” Benioff said at a roundtable earlier this month. “I think when you actually see something on a screen, it is going to be more horrific than in the book. You’re reading these descriptions, but you’re not seeing blood, you’re not seeing a bunch of kids running away, you’re not seeing children’s backpacks getting split in half.” (source)

Didn't want to evade it? The book literally doesn't show children getting shredded and you went out of your way to show us numerous scenes introducing these children just so you can lovingly show them and their world get shredded to ribbons while completely aware and confronting the full horror of their fates like...

Again, I am not trying to moralize here. There is a space for horror, there is a space for exploring horrible things happening to innocents.

But they always talk about these very deliberate depictions of abject cruelty as if it's just *shrugs* "What can ya do? It had to be done!" NO IT DIDN'T. IT'S LITERALLY NOT IN THE BOOK IN THAT WAY. JUST OWN IT. OWN YOUR ARTISTIC VISION. OWN THE FACT YOU GLORY IN MAKING SLASHER LEVELS OF GORE AND TORTURE AND DEHUMANIZATION. STOP BEING SO FUCKING GENTEEL ABOUT IT. JUST FUCKING... LEAN IN TO WHAT YOU ARE INSTEAD OF ACTING LIKE IT WASN'T THE CHANCE TO SHOW CRUELTY THAT ATTRACTED YOU TO THE STORY IN THE FIRST PLACE.

And just as a lateral, US politics note, it felt like this under Trump too. I'm not saying artists depicting cruelty in an artistic work is anything like a politician with real power reveling in flexes of power channeled towards deliberate acts of fascistic cruelty.

But in both cases I felt like I was taking crazy pills because the media would just... speculate about the root desire behind such actions? Like "What could possibly be motivating these guys? Gosh, we don't know, to say what's actually happening here would be far too gauche so we'll just pretend it was an unpleasant byproduct of their TRUE goals, whatever those may be, no matter how implausible they may be."

Like: it's cruelty! The point is cruelty! Some people are just sadists! Some people get off on hurting others or in having the power to hurt others OR (and this is by far the only acceptable version of this and by the way it's completely acceptable to do this in FICTION) in creating artistic works that depict terrible cruelty and sadism.

... So anyway, I definitely went into Three Body Problem going, "Huh, I wonder why Benioff and Weiss chose THIS supremely difficult story to adapt as one of their next big projects?" And then I saw the boat getting shredded and the children they added to the loving depictions of gore and was like, "... Ah, yes. That's why."

(Edit: Just to be clear for those thinking of watching the show, it's not a gore-fest. It was easy to see this scene coming and to look away for it. There's some other moments of violence but those are also pretty easy to anticipate and look away from. This isn't a slasher horror show and it's had a lot of good points (so far). This particular scene just made me go, "Ah, there's the Benioff and Weiss I remember.")

[paula-zotter]

Will from 3 Body Problem 🚀

[3-aem]

drawing gojos third leg whilst watching hour long recaps of horror sci-fi stories please do not interrupt

[xinyuehui]

alright I just started watching netflix 3 body problem, it's so western and white humour (bc it is western produced duhhh)

I'm only half way through ep1, it has this weird uncanny "woke women agenda" going on. We gotta admit Liu Cixin is probably not the best at writing women characters, or many for that matter of fact. I get that netflix is trying to diversify this whole story, there's a bunch of snarky "clever" kind of dialogues, if they thought Li Cixin had too little women in the story, they should just change the gender of them (which they did) and move on. But then they have this weirdo in a bar asking what the women do for a living... then men commenting on how good a woman looked at a funeral and gossiping about her boyfriend as well 😅 there's also dialogue directed at a woman saying "are you two fighting right now...or fucking? Oh! Fighting and fucking..." mate, I am uncomfortable, HELP!

AND YE WENJIE HAS SEX(implied) WITH BAI MULIN - literally what was the need for this!!!??????? THIS TOTALLY CHANGES HER ENTIRE CHARACTER PHILOSOPHY

[orangepeelshortbreadcookies]

So I'm seeing quite a bit of seething outrage in the tag and maybe I'm just adding fuel to the fire here but... the Netflix adaption was pretty good? It's not perfect, the modern storyline in the first two episodes are quite bad in parts (thanks a lot, Auggie 🙄). Some of the dialogue is also weird and clunky in the first two episodes. But it really, genuinely picks up the pace afterward. First and foremost, the visuals are beautiful. I like how the show expanded on the characters in modern times, adore the friendship between the Oxford Five, and I'm in delulu about Jin's and Will's ending (something something ships in the night 😭). Even Auggie has her moments in later episodes, and I find myself pretty satisfied with the end of her arc. The transition from page to screen is mostly effective, and I appreciate that they can just let the visual storytelling do the talking instead of just a lot of declarative statements for character introduction in the books, that could (at least to me) get tedious at times.

I find it to be one of the adaptions where the changes make sense. The diverse cast makes sense. The book takes place in China but it's a story about humanity. Plus you already have your all-Chinese adaptation (a few times as well). Widening the geographic scope to get a new perspective on the story is a pretty valid reason for an adaption. Plus, transnational adaptions happen All. The. Time. Taking shows and movies from other countries and putting your own national take on it is a pretty popular practice. China definitely does it.

The Netflix show has these intimate, quiet moments that are very compelling, and the besutiful music helps further highlight that. On the other hand, I can see where the white-washing argument from some of y'all came from. While I don't necessarily agree with it, I think it's a reductive and just not very accurate description for this show in particular, there are however certain scenes that I would dub Joseph Campbell-infected, which seems more fair and specific to me.

Something that's more baffling to me is the disagreement over Ye Wenjie's portrayal in the show. That she's a bitter, mental old lady in comparison to her counterpart in the book. Did we read the same book??? What did I miss? How was she not a bitter, mental old lady in the book? It's the whole point of her character. That she was a deeply lonely, traumatised woman whose repressed anger and resentment were indistinguishable with intellectualism and who mistook her cynicism for objectivity. Of course she was mental. She was in the midst of a silent breakdown, for otherwise an emotionally functional person would not have made the choice she did and DOOMED THE ENTIRE HUMANRACE TO EXTINCTION. Also her confession to Shi Qiang in the book? Where she believed that the Trisolaran would save humanity based solely on the fact that they are more technologically advanced? That was bonkers. She echoed the sentiment of many real people from her generation, people of invaded countries who look upon the historical colonialism fondly or as a desired solution, because the system in power has failed them. I know actual people like that in my life. They are my loved ones, and they enforce such beliefs on their children, us, like how Wenjie condemned her belief upon the rest of humanity. It's a complex, thorny legacy to carry, and it is insane that we have to carry it. Wenjie is a genius, she's a grieving, empathetic woman who could not access her emotions in a healthy way because she was fucked over in 100 different directions, AND she is an old, bitter, intergalactic war criminal whose mental state is definitely in jeorpady. She is all these things, and both the actresses in the Netflix show did a phenomenal job of portraying every facet of her character.

[evelynpr]

Chinese Tencent version: In the cold mountains of painful labor they shared knowledge and food, nurturing fondness and trust despite their circumstances.

British Netflix version: In the cold mountains of painful labor they shared some ideas ig, held hands, and started making out in a tent. This clearly shows how they form a genuine trusting bond despite their circumstances.

[ekysaivon]

sinner and savior of the two worlds

[mo0nbugs]

HEADS UP FOR OTHER NONBINARY PEOPLE NAMED BUGS, LIKE ME. NETFLIX IS ADVERTISING A MOVIE RIGHT NOW CALLED THREE BODY PROBLEM AND SOME OF THE ADVETISING LOOKS LIKE THIS

I SAW THIS FLASH ON A SCREEN AT THE TRAIN STATION AT 7 IN THE MORNING AND THOUGHT WELP THATS IT THE UNIVERSE IS BROKEN OR IM IN A COMA

[147-moths]

lots of people have been saying the exact same thing but honestly netflix's biggest and most frustrating problem is that they really do treat audiences like the biggest of dumbasses. yea we've seen this time and time again but we have two perfect examples rn in the live action atla and 3 body problem. erasing sokka's misogyny and "internationalising" 3 body by?? making everyone british?? perfectly encompass this descent into dumbed-down everything. i get that there would've been people misinterpreting sokka's arc and i get that there would've been people complaining about the chinese names or whatever but by catering to that specific subset of the audience you lose so much nuance and complexity!! but alas, profits.

also one of the major criticisms against the three body problem was the characters being one-dimensional and dull but like. is this better? is shoehorning romantic relationships fucking everywhere better?? what the fuck is up with ye wenjie and mike evans. WHO asked for this. benedict wong as da shi is perfect but why the fuck is his name CLARENCE

[lovefrombegonia]

MY INITIAL THOUGHTS ON THE 3 BODY PROBLEM NETFLIX SERIES:

[Personal opinions and I haven't finished the series yet]

I like the 3 body problem Netflix series but at the some time...I don't. I might ramble on it later, when I am done watching the whole series.

It's entertaining untill now to me. Like, it's not boring. It's not bad... It's just. *Deep Sigh* it's missing the 🤌🏼✨horror feel✨ of it all happening. I am not...feeling dread as I did when I read the books or even...when I watched the three-body cdrama starring Zhang Luyi.

The flavour of existential crisis is missing. It's...I am gonna sound like a mad woman when I say it but...it's too upbeat 😂 LMAO It's too cheerful. The moodiness is missing. It feels more like a sci-fi thriller rather than horror sci-fi, you know?? Like, I can sleep peacefully after watching an episode of this. It won't linger in my mind like a nightmare I had and then forgot about after waking up but I still know that I had a nightmare.

Again, it's NOT BAD. It's actually pretty good. But...idk... I need to gather my thoughts on whether it's my own bias speaking or is it really that the show is missing something very characteristic from the books.