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Billboard Women in Music 2024
Before a rushed ending soured the “Game of Thrones” fan base on showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss, the duo had rightly earned praise for turning a seemingly unadaptable book series into a very good adaptation. Author and screenwriter George RR Martin had written “A Song of Ice and Fire” as a partial response to the restrictions of television, crafting a story with an expanding ensemble, big battles, sex, violence and abrupt deaths that he couldn’t include. in the scripts. for companies like NBC and CBS. The book series began in 1996, just a few years before the rise of premium cable culture boosters made television friendlier to artistic ambition and less subject to the FCC. With the help of a stellar cast and strong support from HBO, Benioff and Weiss did an exceptional job translating Martin’s vision into a nuanced drama with a wide variety of antiheroes and competing points of view. Before “Game of Thrones” was a juggernaut and ultimately a disappointment, it was a smart, thoughtful and palpably affectionate version of its source material.
For their next big twist, producers have teamed up with “True Blood” alum Alexander Woo to take on an even tougher challenge. The Chinese science fiction trilogy “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” spans hundreds of years, mostly disconnected characters, and several multi-page exegeses on the ABCs of particle physics. To turn writer Cixin Liu’s creation into a Netflix series, the team would have to do more than pool resources or re-earn the trust of those burned by how “Game of Thrones” limped across the finish line. This The adaptation requires reconceiving large portions of the plot from scratch while maintaining Liu’s themes, not to mention envisioning concepts with less precedent on screen than the fantasy tropes Martin deployed and subverted. The result shows some of the tension of this Herculean task, but it also demonstrates that the first seasons of “Thrones” were neither a fluke nor a testament to Martin alone. Benioff and Weiss remain master adapters and, together with Woo, have opened up an accessible entry point into a deeply esoteric story while presenting the action in a suitably epic scope.
“The Three-Body Problem” and “The Three-Body Problem” (the title of Liu’s first volume was changed enough to differentiate the book from the series, though not enough to avoid confusion) begin at same time and place. As the Cultural Revolution sweeps China, young scientist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) watches as a mob beats her father to death in an anti-intellectual frenzy. The scene raises one of the saga’s most powerful ideas: that a brilliant mind could become so disillusioned with humanity that it might turn its allegiance elsewhere, convinced that our species has no hope of guiding its own destiny.
Ye’s radicalization, which takes root in a mysterious military base, is interspersed as flashbacks throughout the first few episodes of the eight-part season. Most of “3 Body Problem” takes place in the present day, as investigator Da Shi (Benedict Wong) investigates a series of apparent suicides committed by high-profile investigators around the world. The funeral of an Oxford academic brings together five former classmates who will play a huge role in what turns out to be a slow-motion global catastrophe: physicists Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) and Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo); materials scientist Auggie Salazar (Eiza González); wealthy businessman Jack Rooney (John Bradley); and the ailing Will Downing (Alex Sharp). An older Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) is also there, although it is initially unclear how she came to the UK or how she spent the intervening years.
Many of these characters are invented, mixed, or substantially modified for the sake of a simplified narrative. It’s hard to believe that a conflict with these stakes would fall on a small group of friends, but as “The 3 Body Problem” unfolds, that’s one of the less incredible aspects of an increasingly outlandish plot. In exchange for a slight raised eyebrow, “3 Body Problem” gets a central cast that acts as the anchor of a literally high-flying story about the survival of humanity. In the end, cryogenic freezing and nuclear-powered space travel have been casually introduced into the equation; Before we get there, we’re introduced to Jack’s youthful hedonism, Saul’s cynical side, and Will’s unrequited crush on Jin. “The three-body problem” is now television, and television needs a compact set of interdependent actors similar to a workplace or a family unit. Only Jin’s boyfriend Raj (Saamer Usmani), a Royal Navy officer, feels truly peripheral. Their relationship seems virtually non-existent, which is an awkward way to introduce a player who quickly cuts short his own journey.
After the death of their mentor, each Oxford student is drawn into the ongoing intrigue. Auggie begins to see an ominous countdown ticking everywhere he looks, a hallucination that seems related to his research into nanofibers. Jin and Jack are sent copies of the same futuristic headphones that Da Shi keeps finding at crime scenes. It’s an ultra-advanced virtual reality game, featuring stunning footage from series premiere director Derek Tsang and his colleagues, including “Thrones” stalwart Jeremy Podeswa. Tasked with saving a civilization from a series of unpredictable cataclysms (Jin’s game is set in imperial China, Jack’s medieval England), the player controls a reality with a strange mix of historical details and computer-aided effects. NPCs “dehydrate” into flat husks to wait out extreme weather events, or suffer with horrifying verisimilitude if they don’t do so in time. There’s a sense of urgency to the game, offering clues to the motivations of those who built and distributed it.
The real three-body problem is an enigma of physics, which cannot consistently predict the motion of three masses in each other’s orbit, whether molecules or planets. The game is a way to illustrate these cerebral and confusing ideas, a trick that “3 Body Problem” consistently pulls off. Later, a substance invisible to the human eye powers a breathtaking action sequence where the inability to see the cause of such chaos only fuels our terror and amazement. The moment when the entire Earth comes face to face with the extraterrestrial force behind the game, the dead scientists and Augie’s visions, is depicted with hallucinatory images that fuse “Inception” with “The War of the Worlds.” At the same time that “3 Body Problem” bases its story on a group of curious young people, the show also imbues a sense of geeky grandeur.
Benioff, Weiss and Woo are not always able to bridge the gap between these two poles. It can be jarring to hear characters in a recognizably contemporary setting talk about building a spaceship factory on the moon. (Despite the aforementioned scenes, some of the more outlandish elements of “3 Body Problem” are described rather than shown.) “Thrones” composer Ramin Djawadi provides a haunting and fascinating theme, but his score has to share space with a pop theme. soundtrack with songs that are sometimes distracting in their efforts to explain the show’s events in vernacular terms. One suspects that Liu’s world is so abstract that even the best possible adaptation will be difficult for some viewers to fully understand, an obstacle that will only grow as the series continues.
However, “3 Body Problem” seems impressively close to that ideal, and not all of its achievements are due to structural choices or cinematic feats. A stoic and forceful Chao offers a moving portrait of fanaticism turned to regret; Among the younger cast, Hong projects equal parts intellect and emotion. “The 3-Body Problem” is ultimately about an asymmetric war that pits humanity against adversaries we cannot see or understand. So it’s even more important to make one side of the exchange indelible enough to put on a show on its own.
“3 Body Problem” premiered at SXSW on March 8. All eight episodes of “3 Body Problem” will be available to stream on Netflix on March 21.