3 Body Problem Has A Five Body Problem

This story contains spoilers for 3 Body Problem on Netflix, streaming now.

The process of adapting the novel The Three-Body Problem was always going to be a tough one. Chinese author Cixin Liu’s Hugo Award-winning sci-fi epic is an intensely cerebral piece of work that covers decades of history and delves into a veritable minefield of scientific and ethical ideas. The story of first contact with an alien race jumps between several characters, includes a video game world dominated by theorists in cosplay, and is explicitly Chinese in its perspective. But it’s not hard to see what David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the showrunners of Game of Thrones, saw in this material that would make it ideal for a lavish Netflix adaptation. After all, they’re the guys who took a grand fantasy series inspired by English history but with added dragons and turned it into a worldwide phenomenon (just don’t ask about the final season). They could give this one a go, right?

In the novel, the main protagonist of the modern-day segments is Wang Miao, a nanotechnology professor who is reluctantly conscripted by the police to help them investigate the various suicides of a group of scientists, some of whom he knew personally. He soon begins to see numbers flashing before his eyes, a countdown leading to something he has no idea about. As the vision eats away at his mental state and distances him from his family, he discovers a strange immersive video game that many of the scientists played before they died. The Three Body Problem of the title is a highly sophisticated MMORPG where players are tasked with solving the mystery of a strange alien planet that is constantly on the verge of destruction.

This one character is divided into five in the Netflix series, a quintet of former physics students bound together after their professor dies by suicide: Augie (Eiza González) has spun her scientific prowess into a multi-billion-dollar business in micro-fibers; Saul (Jovan Adepo) was their late professor’s assistant until her passing; Jin (Jess Hong) works in another lab; Will (Alex Sharp) dropped out to become a high school teacher; and Jack (John Bradley) sold out his ethics to become an obnoxious snacks mogul. It’s a major change, to divvy up one point-of-view to five, and in doing so, 3 Body Problem makes its biggest error.

The series spreads the narrative between these five, albeit extremely unevenly. Some characters get more to do than others, but even the most involved protagonists are left lacking a thorough motivation. Augie is the one who sees the countdown floating over her eyes, but it’s Jin and Jack who enter the video game. Saul, meanwhile, mostly gets stoned and does nothing for the majority of the season, while Will struggles with a terminal cancer diagnosis.

The slightly retitled adaptation, 3 Body Problem, which premiered on Netflix on March 21, is certainly admirable in its approach to adapting the novel. These eight episodes encompass almost the entire core narrative of the first book (there are three in the series, plus a publisher-approved fanfiction). For most of the eight-hour running time, 3 Body Problem hits many of the beats of Liu’s novel. Indeed, it’s as though they’re ticking off the major notes as part of a series speedrun. The key issue, however, is the decision to move the lion’s share of the action out of China and center it on an ensemble of newly created characters who are not as interesting as their book counterparts and often feel superfluous to the action.

It’s not hard to see why such a decision was made. It expands the ensemble and allows the series to be more focused on a diverse array of characters rather than one Chinese professor whose dense jargon is often tough for the casual reader/viewer to fully absorb. Each is meant to represent a different facet of the wider philosophical debate that permeates 3 Body Problem, but often it feels slapdash in execution. Jin is the most adept at navigating both the video game and the wider mystery, but she’s often saddled with the needless comic intrusions of Jack, who exists to be the smug skeptic who constantly reminds the audience that this is all a bit silly. It’s harder to emotionally latch onto any one character because the narrative flits quickly between them and seems unsure of how to integrate them into the drama fully.

3 Body Problem GalleryAs the scientist suicides mystery is investigated, the story leaps back to 1960s China, in the grip of the Cultural Revolution. Ye Wenjie watches on helplessly as her father is brutally murdered as a traitor by his own students. Later, she is conscripted by the military to aid them in a secret operation in a remote radar base. Their mission is to send signals into the outer reaches of space and make first contact with extraterrestrial beings. What happens here will change the fate of humanity.

In the book, Wang is fully defined as the unwitting protagonist. He is capable, intellectually inquisitive, and always aware of the stakes he faces. The magnitude of the suicides and ensuing fallout, leading to the revelation of first contact with an alien species, weighs on him heavily throughout the novel. He offers the clearest perspective of this terrifying future and is appropriately cerebral in his approach, but not devoid of emotion. Because he’s also a scientist, he is also knowledgeable in the various ethical quandaries at play as well as the complicated jargon required to dissect the highly complex problem at the heart of the story.

Wang is often accompanied by Shi Qiang in the book version, a detective and counter-terrorism specialist, nicknamed “Da Shi.” He is crude and blunt in his demeanor but crucial to the story. Where Wang is overwhelmed by the science, Shi is more hands-on. Their partnership is crucial. In the Netflix series, Da Shi is now a British detective brought on to investigate the suicides and monitor the five friends who are connected to them. Benedict Wong, a reliably excellent actor, does what he can with a poorly defined stoic detective role who mostly talks in sardonic whispers. It weakens the mystery aspect of the story to have the one person dedicated to solving the case stuck in the margins and barely interacting with the narrative for so long.

3 Body Problem falls foul of an issue that we often see with adaptations of non-English language material, particularly anime: in an attempt to make the story universal (read: marketable to Americans), the story has become less intriguing and not even all that accessible. John Bradley is particularly wasted as the comedy figure who undercuts the grandiose quality of the book for fear that viewers might see this drama as daft. It’s a major error because the story is deliberately bleak and shouldn’t be diluted (imagine if Game of Thrones endlessly came to a halt to let characters comment on how nonsensical those dragons are). These additions also end up absorbing screen time away from Ye’s story, which desperately needs more room to breathe. Watching her go from a terrified adolescent to the arbiter of a future alien invasion in two episodes renders her massive decision into an annoyed quirk.

The differences are all the more glaring when you watch the other adaptation of this book: Three-Body, released by CCTV in China and available to watch on Peacock in the US. The series is a whopping 30 episodes long, so it obviously has more time to develop the plot and its characters while remaining stridently faithful to the novel. While it is an imperfect series – all the non-Chinese characters are hilariously miscast and the VFX in the video game scenes aren’t as dazzling as they need to be – but the commitment to fully rendering these core protagonists from page to screen is especially admirable. This is crucial for the development of Ye, who feels like an afterthought in the Netflix version despite being the reason everything is happening. Both she and Wang have real personalities in the 30-episode adaptation. We see more of Wang with his family, more of his empathy for his deceased friends, and more of his bromance with Shi Qiang. Having almost four times more episodes to get the job done than Netflix will obviously allow for that, but it only further emphasizes how curiously rushed the American version is, and how little room we have to breathe as a viewer.

Overall, Netflix’s 3 Body Problem has a lot to admire. It really is pretty impressive how much of this heavy and ambitious novel they got into eight hours, and how vividly reimagined the video game is with a nine-figure budget. But in their eagerness to translate something culturally specific and narratively esoteric into an all-pleasing spectacle, it’s the human heart of the story that’s been left behind.