notany

Tom Clancy novels are known for their detail, logic and research behind them. He was actually interrogated by Feds because he had so many details right.

Writers of this series are the opposite of all this. They made no attempt for realism, characters, detail or good narrative. No research behind writing, just trying to string along action scenes with. It's like B-level tv-show from the 80s.

Even the action scenes are from the cheap 80s tv series. Minions who die for their boss, attack by running towards the enemy one by one, shoot with heavy weapons without destroying boxes between the bullets and the hero.

Tom Clancy died in 2013. Jack Ryan's character died with him. Now it's just milking the name. The writers and producers for this are not worth of their pay.

The three-Body book series is high-concept sci-fi and already a classic. It's hard sci-fi with little speculative physics added.

POSITIVES

A typical way to adapt popular sci-fi books into TV or movies is to throw out the concepts, take some characters and broad storylines and make it a conventional mix of adventure, action, and drama.

Not this time. The Three Body TV-series takes the concepts seriously and takes time to walk the audience through details step by step. Even an attempt is worth one star. Unlike typical TV-series where the sense of mystery is made up just to keep people tuned in, there is really clever plot and concepts behind all this.

NEGATIVES

Some characters are added or removed, different storylines are out of sequence. That's understandable if they are well justified and improve the adoption.

Unfortunately, the writers made some bad choices that slows down the narrative without any good reason. They opted to keep explaining some nerdy details for over 20 minutes that don't contribute to the whole story and are not the main ideas. There are already so many concepts that absolutely have to be explored that keeping smaller ones seems like bad decision.

CONCLUSION

For someone who has read the books, this is walking through the memory line, slowly. I fear that for people who did not read the books, the narrative may be confusing. Some visual hints about what is going on are potentially misleading (as can be seen in other reviews.)

If you don't already know the story, it must be approached as a scientific whodunnit. The progresses is slow like in a detective story where nobody knows what is going on. You understand to the scientific explanations to make sense of it. Protagonists and antagonists are both grasping for the whole picture.

Netflix is doing another adaption. I don't think they do as good job as this series with all it's faults.

Netflix needs hours to fill and this is a result. Spoiling nice idea by stretching it too much. I want my money back.

This would have been a good 3 episode miniseries. It was artificially extended to 8 episodes.

Middle episodes are just useless "mysterious" wandering and exploring.

Most characters are just added to fill in time. They don't contribute to the plot meaningfully.

Plagiarism accusations related to graphic novel Black Silence are understandable. On the other hand the plot is not that original if you are familiar with SciFi. There many movies with similar theme. Only the details vary.