3 Body Problem (Show Spoilers Only)

[Cas Stark]

6 hours ago, SeanF said:

After Seasons 7 and 8 (which only appear worse with hindsight), GOT has no rewatch value, for me.

You can rewatch 1-4, all the flaws are still there, but the show is good, sometimes great during those years. 

I also found, that after the horrific 7 and 8, rewatching 5-6, while still bad, were still much better than 7/8 where quality fell off a mountain.

Yes, GRRM bears much responsibility for GOT going totally off the rails once they ran out of books. 

It's interesting that they chose for their project something that had built in so many challenges for an adaptation, instead of something a little more straightforward.   It is hilarious in a bad way that Rian 'yes I ruined Star Wars' Johnson is also involved.  Doesn't bode well, but we'll see I guess, I have not read the source material.

Edited March 10 by Cas Stark

[Consigliere]

Looking forward to this. 

 

Re: GoT and Benioff and Weiss. I think they did a more than decent enough job in seasons 1-4. There was a significant drop-off between seasons 4 and 5 and things just continued downhill from there. As a result, GoT has zero rewatch value for me seeing as how nearly half the run is mediocre at best.

However, it seems to me that a lot of the most vitriolic criticism directed at them for GoT are from people who appear to have taken it as a personal affront and are just rooting for them to fail now.

At the end of the day, my own enjoyment of a show is the most important to me and I don't have a beef with Benioff and Weiss so I'm hoping that they can do a good job with this series.

[Relic]

6 hours ago, IFR said:

They took a series of books that were deliberately written to be unadaptable and made them into one of the most popular and critically acclaimed shows ever? That sort of thing apparently impressed Netflix.

Who in television do you think is better suited to adapt the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy?

Yes, they successfully dumbed down an incredible complex story and made it digestible to the masses.

If you think that's going to work with 3 Body Problem, well, good luck.

I don't understand how anyone at all can blame GRRM for the failings of a show he had no control over. Ridiculous.

[IFR]

42 minutes ago, Relic said:

Yes, they successfully dumbed down an incredible complex story and made it digestible to the masses.

If you think that's going to work with 3 Body Problem, well, good luck.

I don't understand how anyone at all can blame GRRM for the failings of a show he had no control over. Ridiculous.

I'm pretty sure some parts of the final book are impossible to truly adapt. There is no one alive who would be able to take on this series without "dumbing it down" in some way. The question is how much of the ideas from the original work can be retained, and whether alternative approaches they choose to take remain interesting.

Has there been a movie or television series that has taken on an adaptation of thousands of pages and not "dumbed it down"? I would like to know this. Peter Jackson dumbed down Lord of the Rings. As you complain in the Dune thread, Denis Villeneuve had to dumb down elements of Dune. House of the Dragon dumbed down elements of Fire and Blood. And those are the adaptations regarded highly by critics and most of "the masses" (which, allow me to remind you, even though you speak derisively of them, you are one of the masses). It's not going into the countless failures that populate television and movie history.

The closest work I can think of that was successful at this is The Expanse. And even it had to make compromises.

And as for the ending of A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin is free to come up with a better ending any time now. Since it's such an easy thing to do, no doubt he'll have that out soon enough.

Edited March 10 by IFR

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Atleast D&D managed to give GoT an ending, more than I can say about the book series currently. Even GRRM is struggling to end his own incredible and complex story @Relic, so do you really blame them for bungling the final few seasons ? 

Edited March 10 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Oh, snap. Is it me or is it getting salty in here?

Second chances, people. We don't need to relitigate the whole Game of Thrones thing. Nor do we need any preemptive shitting on the next thing.

[IFR]

30 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Oh, snap. Is it me or is it getting salty in here?

Second chances, people. We don't need to relitigate the whole Game of Thrones thing. Nor do we need any preemptive shitting on the next thing.

I'm not salty. And I'm certainly not denigrating the works I've named. I love Dune and Lord of the Rings, and really like House of the Dragon. My question to Relic is merely intended to probe whether there has been any adaptation that has met their expectation. If not, then clearly the problem is not with Benioff and Weiss, but the inherent process of losing something in turning a book into a show. I'm not even saying there is anything wrong with having this rigorous an expectation - I'm often extremely purist myself in what I look for. But if nothing can meet your standards at all, then the argument on how to adapt something is moot, since there is no way to satisfy such a preference.

And I don't consider myself denigrating Martin either. It's clear he has greatly struggled with the ending and he has my sympathies. But because of this, the responsibility of ending another person's vast, detailed story fell on Benioff and Weiss when even that original person proved incapable of coming up with material. Furthermore, Benioff and Weiss had a much more strict timeline to adhere to. And there were many other considerations - a lot of the actors have been quoted as saying that they were eager to move on to other projects at that point. Etc. This is not something Martin had to deal with. So it seems to me that people hold a bit of a double standard.

At any rate, at least with 3 Body Problem, the ending has been written and it's a matter of how in the world they'll translate it to screen.

Edit: I just realized I misunderstood your post. Oh well, I think it's worth keeping what I wrote since pure text can lose a lot of nuance, and it's important to maintain that this isn't a hostile argument, but a simple discussion.

Edited March 10 by IFR

[polishgenius]

2 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

so do you really blame them for bungling the final few seasons ? 

 

Yes. Because in the last season especially they were completely open about deliberately rushing it to get it out the way. A bungle with full effort and enthusiasm is one thing, but they bungled it because they wanted to wrap up and go onto the next thing. It was just disrespectful to the fans, to the work, to the actors... bad look.

I don't think that's gonna come up here though. Certainly not in the first season. Maybe if they decide later that they're bored and wanna do something else, but I think Netflix will likely learn the lessons of HBO and either hold them to making the full season or swapping them out for someone else.  

They did also bungle a lot before that because they were flying bookless, admittedly, but that also won't be an issue here because the series is complete. They did a good job adapting asoiaf while they were adapting, improving on the books in some ways even. They won't be running out of ski-slope here, so they won't need to be off-piste. I think they'll be fine. 

On the other hand adapting a book that's already really good is different than adapting one that's kind of not. So we'll see how they handle tightening up the things that need tightening etc. It might also depend on who's in the writer's room and how they handle it, because iirc there was some emptying of the writer's room on GoT as it went along? 

We already know they're not gonna remove my biggest issue with the first book, but then that would be hard because it's the driving force of the plot for much of it. Can't really blame them for not cutting that.

 

 

 

 

 

[horangi]

On 3/9/2024 at 11:29 AM, IFR said:

This is a fair take. 3 Body Problem, if it comes even close to truly adapting the books, is the most ambitious series on television. There is a lot that can go disastrously wrong.

Out of curiosity, have you watched the Chinese series? I thought they did a good job of sticking mostly with the book and actually improved on the characterization without dumping the science.

[IFR]

4 hours ago, horangi said:

Out of curiosity, have you watched the Chinese series? I thought they did a good job of sticking mostly with the book and actually improved on the characterization without dumping the science.

Yes. Or rather I tried to. It was one of the very few cases where my complaint is that it's too faithful to the book. I found the pacing to be terrible. 30 episodes for a single book that is not even half the size of A Game of Thrones is excessive. As I watched it, I thought how I could read the entire trilogy twice over in the time it took me to finish the first season. And indeed at episode five I dropped the tv series and reread the books. The tv show rehashes the ideas of the book, but to me the book makes it more engaging just by the nature of how it's written. The production values of the tv series were also pretty bad, which is understandable considering that the season was working on a 10 million dollar budget for 30 episodes.

Still, I'm glad the Tencent series exists, and I do think it will be able to cover the second book well enough, for those who like that approach. I would be utterly astonished if the adaptation of book three didn't come off as really, really stupid in the Tencent version though.

At any rate, the good thing about that series is that if anyone takes issue with the liberties in the Netflix version, it's easy enough to point them to the Tencent version to satisfy their expectations. It really is an ideal situation where everyone gets what they want.

[Relic]

On 3/10/2024 at 11:24 AM, IFR said:

They took a series of books that were deliberately written to be unadaptable

I need to go back to this point before replying to your other questions Whoever said that aSoIaF was unadaptable? Where are you getting that from?

 

[IFR]

1 hour ago, Relic said:

I need to go back to this point before replying to your other questions Whoever said that aSoIaF was unadaptable? Where are you getting that from?

 

Martin's own words.

Quote

Best-selling fantasy author George R. R. Martin tried to make Game of Thrones — and the three books that follow it in his Song of Ice and Fire series — “unfilmable.” 

https://ew.com/article/2011/04/04/game-of-thrones-hbo-george-r-r-martin/

[Relic]

13 minutes ago, IFR said:

Martin's own words.

https://ew.com/article/2011/04/04/game-of-thrones-hbo-george-r-r-martin/

Not really tho?

"I said, “The one way this could be done is by HBO.”

Anyway, whatever Martin might have said at some point, clearly he changed his mind. Either way, the show runners took his work and made mince meat out of it, imho. Even S1 had its issues, but everything after that was a cheap imitation of a once great story. The fact that so many people liked what remained of it speaks more of Martin's genius than the showrunners. Once they ran out of his words they shat the bed completely. 

Perhaps that won't happen with 3BP, but trusting a complex story to these dorks is probably not a good bet. 

RE your question about epic works of +1000 pages being adapted, I can't really think of any that fit. Shorter books that i DID enjoy as films are The Godfather and No Country for Old Men. I've also quite enjoyed Justified, which was based on some Elmore Leonard novels. Liked a good chunk of The Expanse, didn't mind The Hunger Games. 

Edited March 11 by Relic

[IFR]

29 minutes ago, Relic said:

Not really tho?

"I said, “The one way this could be done is by HBO.”

Anyway, whatever Martin might have said at some point, clearly he changed his mind. Either way, the show runners took his work and made mince meat out of it, imho. Even S1 had its issues, but everything after that was a cheap imitation of a once great story. The fact that so many people liked what remained of it speaks more of Martin's genius than the showrunners. Once they ran out of his words they shat the bed completely. 

Perhaps that won't happen with 3BP, but trusting a complex story to these dorks is probably not a good bet. 

RE your question about epic works of +1000 pages being adapted, I can't really think of any that fit. Shorter books that i DID enjoy as films are The Godfather and No Country for Old Men. I've also quite enjoyed Justified, which was based on some Elmore Leonard novels. Liked a good chunk of The Expanse, didn't mind The Hunger Games. 

I like those adaptations as well, though less so The Hunger Games.

I think the driving point - and perhaps you'll agree with this - is that faithfully covering Martin's works, which encompass hundreds of characters, and have so many plotlines going on that even he lost control, is a considerable endeavor. 

You call Benioff and Weiss dorks, but who has accomplished any faithful adaptation of that degree? Justified was based on a short story, and was entirely its own thing. Godfather and No Country were both pretty short novels.

No one else in television has come close to this kind of adaptation. There have been many attempts too. The Witcher, Wheel of Time, The Sandman, His Dark Materials, Foundation, etc., etc. If you think Game of Thrones lacked fidelity in how it covered the story, and made mincemeat of all the themes and ideas of its original material, then you ought to be apoplectic watching those. The Sandman even had Gaiman himself involved, but that essentially turned out to be a George Lucas tinkering with his old work sort of scenario.

So Benioff and Weiss may not be up to your expectations, but no one else apparently is either.

Or perhaps you disagree, in which case I ask who is suited to make an adaptation of Three Body Problem? Graham Yost? The Coen brothers? Only Mark Fergus and no one else in television?

[polishgenius]

The Sandman TV show rocks. As good an adaptation as GoTs early seasons. Definitely a harder story to jump mediums with but it did it with aplomb 

[IFR]

19 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

The Sandman TV show rocks. As good an adaptation as GoTs early seasons. Definitely a harder story to jump mediums with but it did it with aplomb 

I thought the adaptation of Preludes and Nocturnes was decent. I thought some things the show did absolutely right, and some things were a complete misfire (eg Constantine). I absolutely hated how The Doll's House was adapted. It killed my interest in the adaptation.

And it does seem like this is a popular take, looking at imdb. But I'm not about to insult Neil Gaiman for, as I see it, mishandling his own work, or accuse those who like it of lacking a sophistication of taste or whatever.

[Ran]

Still haven't gotten to the second half of Sandman, myself. I think I felt some trepidation about how The Doll's House was going to be adapted, but we'll get around to it eventually.

[SeanF]

Overall, I’ve watched quite a few adaptations of novels on TV, that range from decent to very good indeed, like War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, Barchester Towers, The Woman in White.

Granted, I think SFF/fantasy is harder to get right.  

[3CityApache]

I second Polishgenius's opinion about Sandman.

Slow Horses is a great adaptation as well.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Season 1 of American Gods was pretty damn good. Then things kinda went downhill.