‘3 Body Problem’ TV Review: Intergalactic Drama From ‘Game Of Thrones’ Creators Proves More Pedestrian Than Epic, & That’s A Real Problem
09.03.2024 - 07:11
/ deadline.com
SPOILER ALERT: This post contains some details of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, set for an eight-episode launch on the streamer on March 21.
“Why should I get bent out of shape about what the world might look like 400 years from now,” flippantly says physics research assistant Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo) in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem. “I have no control over that.”
The sentiment of those words landed hard on me, because that almost exactly how I felt about the bloated and often remarkably boring big budget sci-fi series from Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, and True Blood producer Alexander Woo.
Premiering tonight at SXSW in Austin’s Paramount Theatre, Netflix’s much hyped series is based on the Hugo Award winning writings of Liu Cixin. Set to launch with eight-episodes worldwide almost everywhere but Cixin’s native China on March 21, the fact is 3 Body Problem is pedestrian at best when it should be epic — and that’s a problem.
Here in the death throngs of Peak TV, this oddly small scale saga of an alien invasion set to arrive centuries in the future is so philosophically pretentious it makes Matrix Resurrections look like Voltaire’s Candide. For those ardent critics of Game of Thrones‘ final season, of which I was not one, 3 Body Problem will engender more than a little bit of toldja – and should remind us all how rarely lightning strikes twice, if you know what I mean?
Ambling along from the murderous chaos of the Chinese Cultural revolution, to a group of scientifically inclined Oxford pals in modern-day London, 3 Body Problem packs in immersive video games, crashing particle accelerators, dying geniuses, Cape Canaveral, and the United Nations (which also figures more powerful and influential in such