The 3-body problem this is what happens when a market becomes too competitive. In the collective indifference (when was the last time you subscribed to a new platform?) the streaming wars continue and the siege on Netflix continues, which defends itself from the attacks with the forces and weapons it has left of increasingly numerous and fierce competition. Netflix’s strategy is always the same: having reached the top of the streaming mountain first and having thus gained an advantageous position, it wants to consolidate this advantage by building an impregnable fortress around itself which in the future will allow it to watch from above, in safety , with indifference to the next battles of the streaming wars. There is only one way to carry out this plan and thus win the war: find an intellectual property to transform into a multimedia franchise (the impregnable fortress), do what Disney did with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and with Star Warswhat Amazon plans to do with The Lord of the Ringswith 007with Star Trek. Netflix has already tried and failed: with The Witcher And Altered Carbon, for example. She tried and almost succeeded with it Stranger Thingsbut now who remembers anymore Stranger Things. She tries again, now, with The 3-body problem.
Two hundred million dollars is an acceptable price for winning a war. Netflix spent a lot to convince David Benioff and DB Weiss to leave HBO and move to the competition. Benioff and Weiss are the creators of the last television event proper, of the last TV series which was also a collective ritual: Game of thronesthe television adaptation of the literary saga – never completed: we are still here waiting The Winds of Winter – low/dark fantasy by George RR Martin. After the finale of Game of Thrones, on the American television and cinema market there was no more expensive, precious and desired commodity than the Benioff-Weiss duo. Since war is war, even Disney had tried to grab them, offering the two the possibility of working on a trilogy of Star Wars all new and all theirs. With Disney at first it seemed like it was done but then nothing was done about it, we never really knew why but the universally accepted explanation is that Benioff-Weiss in the end preferred to work on the thing completely different that Netflix had proposed. Do for us what you did for HBO, this is essentially Netflix’s offer. Take a literary saga hitherto considered impossible to adapt for any screen, large or small, and make it a franchise from which we will be able to continue to extract prequels, sequels, spin-offs, remakes, adaptations until the dawn of time. In exchange, here is 200 million dollars.
The thing completely different that Netflix had offered to Benioff and Weiss was the adaptation of a trilogy of science fiction novels written by Chinese author Liu Cixin, Memory of the earth’s past. Hard sci-fi, the subgenre to which it belongs: that science fiction in which the strong fantastic element – in this case the first contact and the subsequent invasion of the Earth by the alien race of the San-Ti, and humanity’s attempts to avoid the annihilation – combines an attention to scientific verisimilitude between the admirable, at best, and the pedantic at worst. The first novel in the Cixin saga was translated into English in 2014 by Tor Books, an American publisher specializing in all types of speculative fiction from all over the world (in Italy the novel was released in 2017 by Mondadori). Among the first edition in China – Liu published an initial version of the story in the magazine Science Fiction World in 2006 – and the first in the United States, The 3-body problem it achieved all the success that a science fiction novel can achieve today: awards and adaptations (a film, a TV series) in China, in the United States it became the first translation from Chinese to win the Hugo award. It is therefore understandable why Netflix decided that the television adaptation of the Three-body problem should be the first of the many successes to emerge from the 200 million dollar “multiyear overall film and TV deal” signed with Benioff and Weiss. It is also understandable why the platform risked complaints – only in Italy, it must be said – for interruption of public service or for causing alarm in order to promote the series: because The 3-body problem it’s not a series like the dozens of other series that come out every week on Netflix. The 3-body problem it must be a success. This must be the end of the streaming wars as Netflix imagines it.
Watching the eight episodes that make up the first season of the Netflix version of Three-body problemHowever, we also understand why certain novels are defined as impossible to adapt for the big or small screen. It is clear that sometimes it would be better to trust whoever puts these labels on these books and let it go, move on, find an easier and less risky way of spending 200 million dollars. A figure that makes one doubt whether it was actually invested, even if only in a very small part, by looking at it The 3-body problem. She certainly wasn’t invested in paying a capable casting director. The protagonists of the series – five scientists renamed the Oxford Five, in which the three POV characters through which Cixin told the original story were broken up – are played by actors who would struggle to fit into one of the countless and irrelevant Christmas films that The Netflix algorithm serves us during the holidays, let alone in a series that has the ambition of transposing a world-story that deals with all contemporary urgencies: religious fanaticism, anti-scientific hysteria, historical revisionism, the opacity and obscurity of governments, the near or distant but nevertheless inevitable apocalypses, the effects on the human psyche of the multiple realities constructed by technology.
It could be said that in a hard sci-fi TV series it is not the performances of the actors that make the difference but the world building, the ability to show on a screen what was originally written on the pages: the mysterious movements of the universe, immense like the orbits of the planets or tiny like the folds that make up the infinitesimal mass of an atom, all objects of science’s exploratory mission. Even in this The 3-body problem fails: the photography does what it can considering the paucity of the scenarios (almost everything is shot indoors, with artificial light, the very few outdoor scenes are covered and trivialized by the CGI), the direction navigates between narrative urgencies and clumsy homages to Villeneuve’s minimalism, to Nolan’s geometries, to Fincher’s bloody tableu Se7en. The horrendous special effects with which the series tries to transpose the almost scientific wonders written by Cixin have the only merit of allowing the viewer to distract themselves, even if just for a moment, from the terrible performances of the actors. The scientific details on which Cixin focuses so much in his semi-academic digressions are reduced to scribbles on blackboards: there is always a blackboard in the background, in Three-body problem, to confirm the authority of the person who is explaining what is written on the blackboard. Which is almost all that happens in this first season.
What’s left of the Three-body problem? What is there to save? To be honest, nothing. To be optimistic, one could say that at least the series has brought a science fiction story back to the center of the pop cultural debate, something that hasn’t happened since the finale of Battlestar Galactica and although in recent years there have been excellent sci-fi series – Foundation, For All Makind, Andor, The Orville, The Expanse – although not as “hard” as it should and could have been The 3-body problem. The renewal of the series for a second season seems almost certain (one can never really be certain, given Netflix’s tendency to cancel any title that does not have an immediate response from critics and/or the public), so at least we can hope for a second better season than the first. It was reasonable to expect more from a series in which Netflix invested millions of dollars and for which it risked complaints for interruption of public service and caused alarm. But at least it worked as a guerrilla marketing campaign: perhaps this is the only thing that really remains of it Three-body problem.
