“3 Body Problem” on Netflix: The aliens are coming in 400 years

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The aliens are not seen in the series, they only send a human-looking avatar

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Netflix

Even for the American entertainment industry, which is used to superlatives, it doesn't go any higher than "Game of Thrones." David Benioff and DB Weiss created a television event with the fantasy epic as producers, screenwriters and idea providers. One of the most expensive, most successful, most loved and passionately discussed series in the world, in a television era that is not exactly poor in beloved series.

However, the school friends have also experienced how quickly the tide can turn: the eighth and final season of “Game of Thrones” was not well received by critics or viewers, on the contrary. A wave of hate swept through Twitter and Reddit when it was broadcast in 2019 because many fans had imagined a completely different finale for their heroes.

And then there was another problem. Where do you go when you reach the summit?

The series that answers this question can now be seen on Netflix. It begins with a long sequence set in front of a university building in Beijing in 1966. “Away with the vermin!” chant hundreds of students, waving red Mao Bibles. On one stage, scientists are brutally abused and forced to denounce themselves as counter-revolutionaries. A physicist who refuses is beaten to death. The horror of China's Cultural Revolution is in full swing.

Until now, Benioff and Weiss had focused more on dragons and dynastic upheavals in fantastic worlds. Should “3 Body Problem”, the film adaptation of a novel by Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin, have become a solid political series?

Benioff doesn't want to go that far when asked the question in a video interview. The 53-year-old with gray hair looks tired, but passion flares up when he talks about the novel on which the series is based. A book has to have many components to convince him to give five years of his life to a film adaptation: »Here it was a cosmological saga that is strongly anchored in human reality. But I was also drawn to the large images. I wanted to see on the screen how hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the Mongolian army banded together to form a supercomputer. I wanted to see nanofibers break a ship into pieces.”

Liu's novel was published in his home country in 2007. In Germany it took ten years until it was translated under the title "The Three Suns". The epic work also found enthusiastic fans in the West. In 2015 it won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel in the USA, and Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg recommended it. The book is anything but light fare.

Liu, a trained technician and engineer who worked in a hydroelectric power plant before his literary career, interweaves the lives of Chinese figures from the Cultural Revolution to the more recent present with complex scientific and cosmological questions. It's about the three-body problem known from celestial mechanics, which gave the book its title; about multidimensional thinking and about the influence that contact with a superior extraterrestrial civilization would have on the fate of humanity.

In "The Three Suns" aliens have made their way to Earth, who call themselves Trisolarians because of the three suns under whose influence their home planet is and which is destroyed by these suns again and again. Because their solar system is more than four light years away from Earth, it will take them around 400 years to get there. Then they want to destroy humanity and colonize the Earth itself.

In China, where Liu, along with Wang Jinkan and Han Song, is one of the greats of science fiction literature, some of his works have already been made into films, including the short story "The Wandering Earth", the cinema version of which was a box office hit. The Chinese internet company Tencent put a series version of “The Three Suns” online at the beginning of last year.

Netflix, which is not represented in China, is coming quite late with its version, but apparently sees great potential in “3 Body Problem”. Apparently the company cost $160 million for the eight episodes, at a time when Hollywood has been cutting budgets, not least because of skyrocketing costs due to expensive series and films, especially in the streaming sector.

You can tell from the series that the makers really want success with the global Netflix audience.

So Benioff and Weiss have obviously decided not to climb down from the summit and pursue smaller projects. “Once you get the big pack of colored pencils that you can work with, you won’t give them back,” says Weiss. "3 Body Problem" is just the first series as part of a $200 million deal with which Netflix secured exclusive rights from the two super producers. Liu followed the original novel with two more books, which complete the so-called Trisolaris trilogy and provide plenty of material for further seasons. But for that to happen, the first one has to be a hit first.

Benioff, Weiss and Alexander Woo, who reinforces the duo on “3 Body Problem,” of course feel the pressure, but they say it’s part of their job. You can clearly see in the series that they really want success with the large, global Netflix audience. There isn't much that connects it to the novel other than the frame story. After the first episode, which largely takes place in China, the action shifts more and more to the West, especially to Oxford. When asked about it, Alexander Woo at least shows some nerve. His answer is defiant, defensive: "We are re-translating the novel with our film adaptation, of course we won't stay in the People's Republic of China." And - of course! – this gave them the opportunity to expand and change the material: “By the way, the author himself advised us to do that!”

However, the changes are massive. The creators introduce characters that are partly based on the original characters and partly completely new. Some are of Chinese origin but socialized in the West, others are of European and American origin. The series version focuses on five friends who studied together and are among the leading researchers in their fields. Little by little they are drawn into the defense strategies against the destruction of humanity announced by the Trisolarians and soon take on central roles. But you can often see them casually sitting in the pub with a beer, as if they were meeting up for an evening drink after the lecture.

This change in tone has a greater impact than the expansion of the character staff. After the opening sequence, the producers do everything they can to lighten the darkness of the novel. Of course there are special effects and action scenes, but they are not the focus. After all, the series has to deal with the fact that you don't see the aliens and there's no fight. But the philosophical reflections that Liu made in his novel become loose sayings in the series, despite the impending end of the world. Or cheesy love relationships that sometimes concern the protagonists more than the fight against the invaders. During a complicated mission to prepare for Earth's defense, an estranged couple has time to look deeply into each other's eyes and asks them, "What happened to us?"

In moments like this, “3 Body Problem” even slips into unintentional comedy. The series strips Liu's material, which is firmly rooted in a particular culture and time, of the DNA that makes it unique. What's left is a generic Hollywood saga that desperately wants to protect its audience from almost every intellectual and emotional challenge. Maybe that's what happens when the air gets thin up there on the summit.