3 Body Problem Review

If you’re a huge fan of “The Three-Body Problem” and looking for an extremely faithful adaptation of Cixin Liu’s novel, I highly recommend you check out the Chinese-made miniseries currently available on Peacock. If you’re like me and couldn’t make it through the first book of Liu’s trilogy – or if you’ve never read the novel at all – you might find the Netflix adaptation of the story – and I use the word “adaptation” as loosely as David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo do in their use of the source material – more your speed. Taking the Chinese-centric story, moving it to England, and creating a tapestry of characters based on (but not really resembling) several of the novel’s key characters, 3 Body Problem is a valiant attempt at translating a novel that has been called unadaptable to the small screen.*

*It seems we’re in the age of trying to adapt seemingly unadaptable sci-fi stories to the screen, with the recent success of the Dune films and the much more mixed bag over on AppleTV+ with their attempt to take Isaac Asimov’s sprawling epic Foundation and turn it into a somewhat linear story. While I loved the Dune adaptations, I’ve been much cooler on Foundation – although that adaptation, with its looser link to the source material, is much more in-line with 3 Body Problem than the more narratively precise Dune films.

3 Body Problem takes the central premise of its source material – strange things have been happening in physics experiments around the globe and several high-profile scientists have committed suicide, plus there’s a new video game making the rounds among other scientists, asking these brilliant folks to save a civilization from certain doom – and creates a much more streamlined narrative, while introducing Westernized characters in place of their Chinese book counterparts (although this new batch is a very diverse set of characters, not merely a bunch of white European men, so that’s a point in the show’s favor). The biggest weakness of the novel (at least from my perspective) was its reliance on plot over character (we learned precious little about what made the characters we were following on this great complex adventure tick, as the story cared far more about what they could provide to the narrative in terms of their scientific expertise). The series tries to rectify that, to provide depth to characters and make us care about these people who are about to be tasked with a massive ask: Save planet Earth from the massive threat coming its way.

When the series is focused on the mysteries its characters are trying to solve – the mysterious video game that suddenly appears on a table in one’s house or the terrifying countdown clock that one character starts to see all the time – 3 Body Problem is compelling. Our core characters – Jess Hong’s Jin, a brilliant physicist with a heart of gold who might hold the secret to solving this whole conundrum, Jovan Adepo’s Saul, a physicist who refuses to live up to his potential out of fear of people relying on him, Eiza Gonzalez’s Auggie, who has created a potentially world-changing nanotechnology but who is caught between the pull of capitalism and a desire to help those who most need it, John Bradley’s Jack, who dropped out of Oxford and became a multi-millionaire but still feels unfulfilled, and Alex Sharp’s Will, who became an academic rather than follow his friends into research – have been friends since their time at Oxford, and all have key roles to play in the story that unfolds. Rosalind Chao takes on the key role of Ye Wenjie (with Zine Tseng playing her in flashbacks), the one character who makes a clean jump into the series from the novel, tying the different elements of the narrative together through the past into the present. As they all try to decipher just what is happening in the story – along with the audience – the tension ramps up and it’s easy to be pulled into the tale being told.

And then the reveal of just what is going on happens and the story stalls out in a truly strange way. Gone is the deep focus on character. Instead, we’re thrust into your typical sci-fi race to stop the dangerous thing from happening to Earth. And it’s such a disappointment. Yes, there are still flashes of what made the initial set of episodes so compelling – Sharp’s Will gets a nice arc, although there’s a strange scene in the middle that introduces previously unseen family members and feels utterly out of place in the pacing of the overall narrative – but so much of the story now feels hollow without the show’s characters driving the action. One of my major pet peeves with stories like this one is when writers allow the plot to dictate their characters rather than vice versa. And 3 Body Problem falls into that same pitfall – after allowing its characters to drive the narrative forward, it flips the script and does the opposite much to the determent of the storytelling.

That’s not to say that I hated the series or that it’s not worth watching. It has some really compelling sequences – the scenes within the video game are really cool and much easier to follow than in the novel and really get to the heart of the story’s central conflict quicker and with more finesse than the novel did – and it also has an excellent leading performance from Jess Hong. This is not an easy story to adapt and requires a lot of complex scientific explanations to be boiled down so that laymen can understand them (I certainly needed the easy version of the science explained to me). Hong is tasked with much of this explanation in addition to having the added complexity of being the audience surrogate throughout much of the story. We learn things as Jin learns them – and we understand things as Jin understands them. She’s our entry point into the world and becomes the key character in solving the massive problem that is revealed to the world at large. In fact, out of the host of characters presented to us, it’s Jin who is the only fully fleshed out character amongst them. Sure, some get more shading than others – Ye Wenjie gets an entire backstory, so we learn a heck of a lot about her if we only get bits and pieces regarding her emotional journey (which is a major misstep in the series) – but it’s Jin who truly feels like a fully formed person by the close of the season. And much of that comes from the absolutely stellar work of Hong in the role.

So, is 3 Body Problem worth your time? It depends. If you’re looking for a pretty good sci-fi series that never reaches the heights it could, give it a watch. If you’re a super fan of the source material and don’t mind that the series doesn’t hew particularly close to the novels, again, this might be up your alley. But this isn’t the exceptional piece of storytelling it could be, missing the key balance between story and character throughout its run. But there’s still some things to enjoy here and I found myself intrigued enough to watch it all the way through. As for a second season? I don’t think I’m invested enough to continue this particular journey. And perhaps that says it all.

3 Body Problem is currently streaming on Netflix. It runs for eight episodes.