The 3-Body Problem is a complicated science fiction story crammed with impressive visuals and some effective special effects. Although derived from a celebrated book by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin, said to be rigorously scientific and absorbing, the Netflix series (eight episodes) mostly bundles together well-worn cliches and, ultimately, isn't that compelling. After a strong start, the show gets lost in the intricacies of its globe-trotting plot and, because the 3 Body Problem is the first of a series of novels, ends in a welter anti-climaxes intended to set up the inevitable sequels.
Something has gone wrong with the laws of physics, at least on a quantum level. Chaos rules at the world's greatest laboratories and results derived from huge particle accelerators and other impressive apparatus make no sense. Physicists take their theories and formulae seriously and the fact that their laboratory results seem randomized has driven a number of these scientists to kill themselves, often in gruesome or picturesque ways. At first, the show seems something on the order of a detective or crime picture -- the question presented to the hard-bitten authorities is whether the scientists are simply committing suicide in dramatic ways or being systematically killed. This turns out to be a red-herring since this aspect of the plot fades into insignificance once the narrative begins in earnest.
Some impressive flashbacks introduce us to a woman named Ye, also a world-class physicist, but a traumatized survivor of Mao's Cultural Revolution as well. (These scenes directly engage with the source novel; however, the rest of the film has been largely transposed to London and the West, featuring a cast that is about half Asian and half European or American.) After seeing her father beaten to death at a huge public rally, Ye gets sent to a concentration camp somewhere in Mongolia. She survive and her talents as a physicist are recognized; she is recruited to work on a secret project operated on a mountain top overlooking the vast forests of inner Mongolia. The Commies on the mountaintop are trying to contact aliens. Ye figures out how to use the sun as an amplifier (don't ask me how this works) and transmits a message to a nearby star. In that star system, there are beings called (in the Netflix version) Santees. These critters are highly advanced and communicate with one another telepathically. They are interested in the Earthlings and begin communicating with a cult-like order of their worshipers on Earth. (I wasn't able to figure out how this cult formed or why. I think Ye had something to do with it. The plot seems to suggest that Maoism with its mobs of like-minded robot Red Guards waving Mao's little red book in the air is similar to the group-think of the cult founded by Ye and Santee's collective consciousness -- this is an interesting idea but never developed in the show.) Unfortunately, one of the Santee servants on our planet reads a a fairy tale to his Lord (the Santee are hive-mind in which "they" is a "he" or "she" depending upon the scene). The Lord is horrified to learn that the earthlings can lie to one another and, in fact, do this frequently. Shocked that sentient beings can misrepresent the truth, the Santee cut off communications with the Earth declaring that they are "very afraid" and launch an expedition to attack our planet where they, apparently, intend to exterminate "the bugs" as they now call the inhabitants of our world -- this seems a distinct over-reaction of "Little Red Riding Hood." (The murderous intent of the space aliens doesn't keep members of the Santee cult from continuing to revere the space monsters.) Interstellar travel is taxing and we are told that it will take 400 years for the aliens to reach our planet to wipe us out. All the best minds on Earth are recruited to a secret "Manhattan project" in which counter-measures are developed to repel the Santee invasion penciled onto our human calendar for 400 years in the future. When she was imprisoned in Mongolia, Ye met a ecology-minded Anglo named Mike Evans with whom she may have had an affair. Evans, uses his scientific savvy to become an energy mogul -- (everyone in the show is genius of one sort or another). How Evans morphed from conservationist and ecology crusader to a world-destroying plutocrat is not clear to me. The show is fairly dull in places and I may have fallen asleep when this was explained. Evans spearheads the Manhattan project underway to devise means to forestall or repel the Santee invasion.
I have to make surmises as to how certain parts of the show fit together because much of the plot is indecipherable -- perhaps, you are supposed to have read the Chinese novel before watching the TV version. (Although I doubt that this would be too helpful since the names and places used in the Chinese original have all been changed so that the story could be lifted out of China and dramatized as occurring in London and its environs.) There's a effects-heavy subplot about virtual reality video games that doesn't make much sense and that I didn't understand. My guess is that the Santee, using proxies on Earth, have devised the VR game, utilizing gleaming steel helmets to deliver the computer content into the brains of the players, to destabilize the Earthlings and lure our best and brightest to their doom. The game scenes have a sword and sorcery (or Game of Thrones) vibe and feature lots of decapitation, armies of dehydrated zombies who are revived by being cast into the sea, and much dim-witted Dungeons and Dragons bullshit -- this subplot is pretty much an embarrassment and I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to mean. Further, the show inexplicably drops the story after about the third installment although in the last twenty minutes someone discovers yet another helmet terminal for the VR game and dons the device. (I don't recall who this was or why this was supposed to be significant). The VR scenes establish that planets entrapped in a three sun system (the titular 3 bodies) involve orbits that can't be reliably calculated, leading to long periods of "chaos" in which civilization is impossible -- I surmise that the Santee are trying to destabilize human culture so that our propensity for lying doesn't infect them, that is, induce three-body dynamics on Earth. In the end, there's a space shot in which the disembodied brain of one of the heroes is sent on a mission to encounter the Santee, a ride in a fast conveyance that, even at 1% of the speed of light, will take, at least, 200 years -- the hero's brain is put in a canister and kept in a twilight state of suspended animation during the space trip. Things go awry and the eight hours of 3 Body Problem end with the protagonists vowing to fight smarter and better in the next series.
The plot is driven forward by a group of attractive young scientists who are like apprentices on the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek. They're all incandescently brilliant, pretty, young, fit, and prone to wise-cracks. Several of them get killed for no good reason. The leader of this cadre of young heroes is a Black man named Dr. Saul Durand -- he's sort of a catalyst around which the characters gather: the others are a snack manufacturer ("Jack's Snacks" is his business) who's horny and cynical -- he gets offed early in the show which is too bad because his character was reasonably interesting. A beautiful young woman named Auggie has developed ultra-strong and durable fibers -- this is some sort of nano-technology which is so threatening to the Santee that they threaten her with a running countdown projected onto the cornea of her eyes that stops only when she gives up her scientific endeavors. This woman's technological innovations are central to several big scenes in the show: the showstopper is a sequence set at the Panama Canal; the sinister and self-loathing cult of Santee worshipers have taken to the seas after the manner of Ron Hubbard and his scientologists (cf. Sea Org). They are traitors to their species, inviting the Santee to appear and wipe out the "bugs' -- that is human kind. When the Santee cult on their vessel "Judgement Day" sail through the Canal, tiny, invisible strands of nano-wire are set up to block their passage. These fibers act as a giant wire cheesecutter slicing the Judgement Day and its passengers into lateral segments -- this is a gory and impressive sequence that is undeniably effective, although gratuitous; one would think that the objective of stopping the Santee cult could be accomplished without using the momentum of the ship to slice everyone into six inch wide slabs of metal and gore. Toward the end of the series, the Manhattan project scientists again enlist Auggie to build a "radiation sail" to power their spacecraft carrying the disembodied brain into the lap of the Santee -- what this is supposed to accomplish is also unclear. Auggie's last scene is in Mexico where she is using her nano-fiber filters to finally solve the problem of bad, diarrhea-inducing water in that country. Dr. Ye, who loves the Santee, goes back to Mongolia and, apparently, jumps off a cliff next to the ruins of the radio telescope that sicced the Santee on our world. Her motivations have been impenetrable throughout the show.
3-Body Problem has a big cast. But the characters are all, more or less, stereotypes, an aspect that is typical of Science Fiction, where the concerns of the narrative don't have much to do with psychology and schematic motivations are characteristic. There's the avuncular and down-to-earth African American, Saul Durand, the obsessed and driven scientist Auggie, some other science types including a nerdy Chinese girl-savant, and a young man dying of pancreatic cancer who never really dies, long outliving his welcome on screen -- he's an irritating figure and his fate, of course, is a bummer. These young people have boy- and girl-friends and there's some low level and uninteresting romantic intrigue among them. The dying guy has bought a star for one of the women (she's going out with a dashing Indian naval officer) -- he's spent 19.5 million dollars to have the star named after the girl but he's too shy to tell the woman about his lavish and futile gift. Before he can come clean, his brain is excised, stuffed in a flask of what looks like dry ice and shot into space. On his death bed, the young man is confronted by his sister and her husband and they ask him to make sure that they inherit his wealth -- this sequence is baffling and typical of much of the show: characters appear with demands of various sort, conflict with one another, and, then, drop out of the plot entirely.
I think this show is carefully scripted and suspect that it makes sense if closely watched. But the subject matter is just junk of a predictable variety and, so, although you're entertained it's not enough for you to keep close track of the proceedings. After a while, you can't really figure out what is going on because the material isn't intrinsically interesting enough for you to undertake the intellectual effort of keeping track of all the intricate, and, seemingly, random plot developments. Everything seems theoretical, a point that the characters make within the plot as well -- the Santee aren't due to land on Earth for 400 years so why are we all so upset and determined to repel them? We live in a world in which everyone was warned about climate change for the last fifty years and, yet, no one has done anything, just kicking the can down the road for another couple decades or so. Why would the threat of an alien invasion four-hundred years in the future cause anyone much concern. If we haven't been moved to worry about the sea's turning into steam baths and inundating the coast as Greenland's ice-cap melts and Antarctica's ice shelves crash into the sea, why would an alien invasion announced for the year 2425 cause us any concern at all? My point is that all the epochal and world-ending imagery in 3-Body Problem lacks urgency -- we all revert to magical thinking: either the aliens will get detoured to some other star-system or we'll figure something out; a solution can always be improvised so long as we don't have to accomplish this feat today.
No comments:
Post a Comment