3 Body Problem (Show Spoilers Only)

[Zorral]

Generally the reviews from overnight views of at least 4 episodes are enthusiastic.

There are others though, which are reluctantly not so enthusiastic, generally around, "Yes, this is spectacular to look at, but character and story are far too thin."

Netflix's pr push on this is massive.  Our mid-day public radio station program gave a full half hour to talking about the show with Rosalind Chao, who reads the audio book version and plays Ye Wenjie in the NF adaptation.

 

[IFR]

I'm keeping this thread spoiler free. It's easy enough to hide spoilers, and since all episodes are released, people will be watching this at different rates.

I watched the first episode and liked it quite a bit. I have a few nitpicks, but I think it was a strong opening episode.

[Iskaral Pust]

I’m looking forward to starting this but I have the books sitting in my to-read pile on my Kindle.  I’m torn about whether to wait until I’ve read them.  The deciding factor will probably be whether my wife wants to watch; she’s never worried about waiting to read first (there’s a dearth of good TV options, so don’t limit them).

[IFR]

3 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I’m looking forward to starting this but I have the books sitting in my to-read pile on my Kindle.  I’m torn about whether to wait until I’ve read them.  The deciding factor will probably be whether my wife wants to watch; she’s never worried about waiting to read first (there’s a dearth of good TV options, so don’t limit them).

The books are absolutely worth reading. I think this first season can be watched without really spoiling the breadth of the book series, and the show is pretty good.

I recommend avoiding the Tencent adaptation though. It's inferior to the books in every way, and probably will take you twice as long to get through the first season as all three of the books. It's kind of shocking how badly paced it is. It would be like stretching Lord of the Rings out for 100 hours. I mean, it does seem to appeal to a niche audience. And of course Chinese seem to like it. But I half-suspect that Chinese like it because their cinema is in such a dire state that anything with a modicum of ambition is worthy of acclaim there.

[karaddin]

My body decided it was a great time to get sick again so this has kept me occupied and now I'm finished already lol.

Clearly I enjoyed it. 1st episode was probably the roughest

Spoiler

Until I realised how the past story was fitting in with the present.

 

[AncalagonTheBlack]

3 hours ago, karaddin said:

My body decided it was a great time to get sick again so this has kept me occupied and now I'm finished already lol.

Clearly I enjoyed it. 1st episode was probably the roughest

  Reveal hidden contents

Until I realised how the past story was fitting in with the present.

 

Me too, I'm down with a throat infection and I've binged 5 episodes.

I'm really enjoying this so far. It's definitely binge-worthy! 

[Heartofice]

I started to watch the first episode, it seems.. ok. I was quite distracted by how impossibly hot the professor 'Auggie' is.. this is almost a Denise Richard as Dr Christmas Jones from 'The world is not enough' situation.

[Zorral]

14 hours ago, IFR said:

I half-suspect that Chinese like it because their cinema is in such a dire state that anything with a modicum of ambition is worthy of acclaim there.

Perhaps, not everything! 

‘Flat and shallow’: Netflix’s 3 Body Problem divides viewers in China
Eight-episode series based on Liu Cixin novels triggers accusations of ‘Americanisation’ of a Chinese story

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/22/netflix-3-body-problem-divides-viewers-china

 

[Mexal]

5 hours ago, Heartofice said:

I started to watch the first episode, it seems.. ok. I was quite distracted by how impossibly hot the professor 'Auggie' is.. this is almost a Denise Richard as Dr Christmas Jones from 'The world is not enough' situation.

Attractive people can be really smart too.

[Heartofice]

31 minutes ago, Mexal said:

Attractive people can be really smart too.

Not when they are that attractive

[Iskaral Pust]

We really liked the first episode.  I think we’re hooked and will binge through this quickly. (an episode per evening is fast for us, especially dealing with jet lag this week)

How is the portrayal of the Cultural Revolution perceived in modern China?

[JGP]

I haven't read the books, so bear with me, but the whole 3 Body thing as presented in the show was nagging at me. 

Posing the problem through the VR game was just a recruitment tool, or?  

Edited March 22 by JGP

[Kalbear]

Just now, JGP said:

Posing the problem through the VR game was just a recruitment tool, or?  

Spoiler

Yep, basically. It was a way for them to find people who would be sympathetic to the aliens and potentially be interested in helping them. 

 

[Mudguard]

I really liked the books, liked the Tencent adaptation, and so far, I've liked the first few episodes that I watched of the Netflix adaptation.

The Tencent adaptation, which also covers just the first book, is more faithful to the books, but I'm OK with the changes in the Netflix adaptation.  The first book is the most straightforward to adapt on screen.  Very curious about how they will adapt the second two books.  The final two books span a huge amount of time.

[Myrddin]

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Not when they are that attractive

Heady Lamar would like a word. Or I guess let her patents speak for her.

[horangi]

1 hour ago, Myrddin said:

Heady Lamar would like a word. Or I guess let her patents speak for her.

A bit of a side track but, yeah, my partner is quite attractive by fairly general (and other than my own obviously far biased) standards, and its opinions like the aforementioned that has been her biggest challenge while wrapping up her PhD in the sciences.   It unfortunately seems to be particularly bad with other women who seemingly can't take the idea that someone can be attractive, fashionable, and still master cutting edge research.  Getting papers published helps, but it seems beauty causes a lot of folks to mentally subtract 20 points of IQ from their expectations of a person until they know who they are talking to.  Or has she has put it bluntly, being attractive in the sciences is a bad thing.

On to the show, I watched the first episode and thought they did a good job of speeding up the pace without cutting too much.  I was skeptical about the re-imagining of Wang Miao, but in hindsight, the characters were so thin in the books that it doesn't really diminish the plot and allows showing the human response as more of a global effort rather than the rest of the world basically tagging along behind China.  I don't blame Liu Cixin for this, I am sure many western sci-fi novels come across the same.  There wasn't much that required the characters to be in China during the detective story anyway.

Spoiler

The CCP journalist gets a clean conscience in this version.  One thing that occurred to me this time around that I thought curious.  Why didn't the 'winking' universe with an easy code to crack lead to mass panic across the globe?  You'd think there would be doomsday cults popping up everywhere and other kinds of upheaval. 

 

Edited March 22 by horangi

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Episode 5 prologue:

Spoiler

Someone's been listening to the Radio War Nerd

ETA: I'm liking the show so far.

Edited March 22 by Deadlines? What Deadlines?

[IFR]

7 hours ago, Zorral said:

Perhaps, not everything! 

‘Flat and shallow’: Netflix’s 3 Body Problem divides viewers in China
Eight-episode series based on Liu Cixin novels triggers accusations of ‘Americanisation’ of a Chinese story

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/22/netflix-3-body-problem-divides-viewers-china

 

The Netflix version is very divisive among Chinese viewers. Imdb is currently getting some review bombing shrapnel from Chinese viewers who are outraged that this isn't a direct facsimile of the Tencent version (also some vestige of the mentally juvenile who are cannot let go of their hate of Benioff and Weiss for "ruining" GoT and so give this show a 1). You can also see this on the reddit page. Lots of upside Chinese viewers there too.

37 minutes ago, horangi said:

A bit of a side track but, yeah, my partner is quite attractive by fairly general (and other than my own obviously far biased) standards, and its opinions like the aforementioned that has been her biggest challenge while wrapping up her PhD in the sciences.   It unfortunately seems to be particularly bad with other women who seemingly can't take the idea that someone can be attractive, fashionable, and still master cutting edge research.  Getting papers published helps, but it seems beauty causes a lot of folks to mentally subtract 20 points of IQ from their expectations of a person until they know who they are talking to.  Or has she has put it bluntly, being attractive in the sciences is a bad thing.

On to the show, I watched the first episode and thought they did a good job of speeding up the pace without cutting too much.  I was skeptical about the re-imagining of Wang Miao, but in hindsight, the characters were so thin in the books that it doesn't really diminish the plot and allows showing the human response as more of a global effort rather than the rest of the world basically tagging along behind China.  I don't blame Liu Cixin for this, I am sure many western sci-fi novels come across the same.  There wasn't much that required the characters to be in China during the detective story anyway.

  Reveal hidden contents

The CCP journalist gets a clean conscience in this version.  One thing that occurred to me this time around that I thought curious.  Why didn't the 'winking' universe with an easy code to crack lead to mass panic across the globe?  You'd think there would be doomsday cults popping up everywhere and other kinds of upheaval. 

 

Spoiler

I agree. There would be plenty of alarmism with the "winking" of the cosmic background radiation, but that's a more abstruse event and more controllable for public exposure. The winking of radiation in the visible spectrum is much more apparent, and one would anticipate a stronger reaction.

I was actually fine with how most of the science was handled in the show. It wasn't dumbed down, it was just given miminal explanation, so even if that made it more ostensibly a soft science show, I don't consider it actually reaching that point.

The two exceptions I had (having watched up to episode 5) were the CBR you mentioned; and the VR headset, which is an instance of the aliens actively giving humans advanced technology, which is directly opposed to the aliens' agenda of arriving while maintaining technological superiority. In the book, the VR is a recruitment tool that makes use of technology current to humans at that time period.

 

 

[horangi]

23 minutes ago, IFR said:

 

  Hide contents

The two exceptions I had (having watched up to episode 5) were the CBR you mentioned; and the VR headset, which is an instance of the aliens actively giving humans advanced technology, which is directly opposed to the aliens' agenda of arriving while maintaining technological superiority. In the book, the VR is a recruitment tool that makes use of technology current to humans at that time period.

 

 

Spoiler

Yes, since the trisolarans can't send anything physical to Earth it would suggest they provided the technology to fabricate the headset in this version with its neural link etc.  This in contrast to beaming over programing whose source code is (presumably) unhackable by humans and having it installed on existing human tech in the book and Chinese version.  (I haven't seen the whole series yet, so this might be obvious). 

 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

2 hours ago, IFR said:

The Netflix version is very divisive among Chinese viewers. Imdb is currently getting some review bombing shrapnel from Chinese viewers who are outraged that this isn't a direct facsimile of the Tencent version (also some vestige of the mentally juvenile who are cannot let go of their hate of Benioff and Weiss for "ruining" GoT and so give this show a 1). You can also see this on the reddit page. Lots of upside Chinese viewers there too.

 

Fucking nerds. 

You know, the Sci Fi / Fantasy / CBM crowd can be really embarrassing sometimes. Jesus christ it's been 5 years and they have an all new ASOIAF show to enjoy. An embarrassment of riches when you consider the broader landscape.  Jesus, just let it go. 

I just finished the show and I thought it was pretty good. I've never read the books but from what I know about it, it's been pretty faithful in terms of the broad concepts and general story. 

Yeah. Bring on season 2. 

Edited March 23 by Deadlines? What Deadlines?