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| This review contains spoilers for the novel “The Three-Body Problem” and the television series “Three-Body.” There’s no way around it. |
| The highly acclaimed trilogy of Chinese science-fiction novels collectively known as “Three-Body,” in which Earth is threatened with invasion by technologically superior aliens, is generally understood to reflect historical Chinese anxieties about Western domination. Which makes it a little amusing that, 17 years after the story was first serialized, the books are about to get more attention than ever because of a big-budget American adaptation, due later this year on Netflix. Comments about appropriation and cultural sensitivity will start to pour in minutes after the episodes are posted. |
| In the meantime, little attention is being paid in the United States to an ambitious Chinese series, “Three-Body,” that has beaten Netflix’s “3 Body Problem” to the screen. No trade barriers or worries about state secrets here: The 30 episodes of “Three-Body” are premiering on Rakuten Viki in the United States, with subtitles in English (among many other languages), on the same day they appear in China, where they are reportedly setting viewing records for Tencent’s WeTV streaming service. Outside of the sci-fi fan base, however, they don’t appear to be causing a ripple in America. |
| The books’ author, Liu Cixin, has endorsed the Netflix series (he’s a consulting producer), though the show’s largely non-Chinese cast indicates that it tinkers significantly with his story. He doesn’t appear to have been involved with the Chinese series, but one of its hallmarks — the subject of many approving viewer comments on Rakuten Viki — is its faithfulness, in broad outline, to the trilogy’s first novel, “The Three-Body Problem,” on which it is based. |
| A lot of Liu’s dialogue seems to have been moved straight from book to screen (though questions of translation, in both media, make it hard to be sure). Through 20 episodes, most of the major plot points arrive at about the same places they did in the book. For Liu’s hard-core fans, that may be all that matters. For a general audience, the show’s similarities to the book may be more problematic. |
| Liu’s “The Three-Body Problem” takes place in Beijing during the novel’s setting in the mid-aughts, with flashbacks to the countryside 40 years earlier. It is superficially a mystery, with a mismatched pair, the reserved physicist Wang Miao and the Rabelaisian cop Shi Qiang, investigating a rash of suicides among high-level scientists. Discovering what lies behind the deaths involves uncovering a conspiracy that dates to the Cultural Revolution; it also involves Wang’s frequently donning virtual-reality gear to play an elaborate, cosmically expansive video game. |
| The story’s bleakness, its motifs of environmental destruction and the possibility of human extinction give it resonance, as does its allegory of the despair and vengefulness fostered by the Cultural Revolution. But what sets it apart is how science, rather than being a backdrop or framework, drives the action at every turn. |
| Liu’s style reflects this: Structurally, the book proceeds like a mathematical proof, with arguments — about science, nature, society — building upon one another toward a conclusion that has been veiled, but visible, since the beginning. Wang’s unraveling of the mystery takes the shape of a capsule history of scientific and technological advances. And the plot advances less through action than through long, expository statements or recaps of past events. |
| In recognition of this, the creators of the Chinese “Three-Body” series have made some logical choices. Without materially changing the story, they have shifted the balance toward the present (in this case 2007, during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics) and focused more firmly on the serio-comic frenemy relationship of Wang and Shi (Zhang Lu Yi and Yu He Wei). The details of police work get more attention, and contemporary characters, mostly female, are added or greatly expanded upon, including a reporter (Rong Yang), Shi’s all-business deputy (Zehui Li) and Wang’s wife (Min Liu). Scenes that are formulaically funny (Shi gruffly babysitting Wang’s daughter) or suspenseful (murder on a long train ride), but have nothing to do with science fiction, have been added. |
| There’s no getting around the science, though, and the series hasn’t come up with a more interesting way of dramatizing it than having characters repeat the same speeches they make in the book. Onscreen, with a cast that mostly doesn’t rise above adequate, that’s not very exciting. It also doesn’t help that the vivid imagery of the book’s video-game scenes, which helped compensate for the flatness of the narrative and the characterizations, isn’t done justice in the show’s prosaic 3-D animation. |
| On a more fundamental level, many American viewers not accustomed to Asian series will be bemused by the stilted, nonidiomatic quality of much of the crowdsourced subtitling. And they will notice that while there are some lovely images of nighttime Beijing and the surrounding country, the overall production quality — the staging, the performances, the use of music — is beneath that of the usual prestige series. |
| But if you have the patience and an appetite for thoroughly imagined speculative sci-fi, you can consider the show’s deficiencies the import duty for the delivery of a good tale. And while “Three-Body” displays the propensity, common in Chinese TV drama, for telling a story as if reading a book to a child, here that has an advantage: If a science-driven plot twist confuses you, it will be explained again before the scene is over. |
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