The Three-Body Problem

I have not read the trilogy. I learned about this series from my research after watching the netflix adaptation. I found the netflix series entertaining and well produced but I could tell it was drawing from source material more complex than what was presented. Thus my research to find out more about Liu Cixin. I was planning to start reading the trilogy (and I will) but saw this Chinese production.

So, I am pretty nerdy and I love more expository, detailed sc-fi. The flashy stuff is fun but give me some complex ideas to chew on and I am in heaven (think Mindwalk, Jacobs Ladder, Stalker). The Chinese production, Three-Body, has that in spades, maybe even too much. For me this series really drew out the existential crisis of the impending arrival of an more advanced extraterrestrial civilization. The motives of the various chacters are well developed as are the philosophical and scientific concepts. I found the acting and screenwriting mostly well done. The production quality was ok, though uneven (especially the soundtrack). I personally found the insights into modern Chinese culture quite fascinating as well.

I did find the subtitles to be poorly executed, often flashing too briefly to read easily. One episode had the subtitles out sync which obviously made for a tough watch. The pacing is uneven but really improves in the final 10 episodes (out of 30).

Overall I have really enjoyed the series. There is enough intellectual stuff to keep me engaged and the production is pretty good but not perfect. I look forward to reading the trilogy and then watching the series again.

This could be better than the netflix version, as it is a more faithful adaptation, but that's not always the most important thing and this show suffers with some pretty bad pacing issues because they are using dialogue directly from the book in some scenes and it seems as if they aren't leaving out a single page aside from chronologically shuffling a few things about. Not necessarily out of order overall, but out of order of how they are presented in the books.

There's a ton of exposition in the books that could actually be shortened in the show because you are actually able to show more of the things that the book had to tell you. They don't go this route. They show AND tell everything. It makes for some unnecessarily long scenes. This shouldn't have been more than 15 or 16 episodes max. I have a hard time believing that I would have liked this if I had not already read the novel.

One difficulty of book adaptations is it will never play out perfectly as it would in each reader's mind. Of course the show won't live up to the masterpiece that is Three Body Problem. That kind of scifi epic only happens ever so often; one's that can be adapted to a show even rarer. However, the show stays true to "show, don't tell", and despite some negligible flawed, eager ensemble acting, as well as a few examples of over-exaggerated editing here and there, it incorporates much of the content from the books while adding much non-cgi visually impressive elements to enrich the shows format as a visual medium. One aspect I especially enjoyed was the main cast. The casting for major characters also reflects the books surprisingly well, and the acting of major characters deserve to be applauded.

Overall, watch this show. It's engaging, aesthetically pleasing, and retains most of Liu Cixin's psychological mind-bending science fiction masterpiece.

Give it to the Chinese themselves to adapt the work of their most beloved sci fi author to the silver screen almost word for word that they need 30 frickin' episodes to tell the whole story. I myself appreciate greatly the effort they pulled that you can see the love the directors and writers put in this project, contrasted to what their western counterparts do when it comes to adaptation these days. Need to work a little bit on the cgi parts tho, hope this show kills it at least in China so they may get the movie budget if the studio greenlits the adaption of the next two books, which I really hope they do. This is quiet frankly a fine alternative to the self-insert, politically driven hollywood projects, and yes, I have no intention at all to follow the netflix version of the adaptation no matter how much they put their budget into it (well, maybe just the trailer).

The casting is great and really fits my imagination when I read the novel (except that Shi Qiang needs to be a little more muscular). The story was beyond imagination, really epic, and it's not about one single country or one single culture, you can see every nation, every race united together when facing danger. The TV series tried to make everything the same as the book. One star was deducted because the pacing of story telling, all the flashbacks and neon lights scenes are a bit annoying and confusing, when not everyone knows the background of the story. Although the novel itself was arranged in this way, I think there should be some adaptations when you making it a TV series.