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Nolan_Kubrick
Reviews
3 Body Problem (2024)
Spoof tv show by mixing Stranger things and interstellar
Spoilers ahead!!
Watched all 8 episodes. Disappointed!
I haven't read the books, but I couldn't believe it had such enormous hype. I hope this isn't a true adaptation.
For a story revolving around physicists, this makes a mockery of the entire scientific community. Fate of humanity rests on the hands of a bunch of post-docs from a single dept of one university all working under the same professor? Yeah why not! Let's not forget one of them is a potato chips salesman.
Where are the astrobiologists? Nuclear physicists? Experimentalists? Astroliguists? Engineers? Don't ask!
Atleast they could have developed these characters better to make us believe in them. For instance, they could have been PhDs or postdocs whose careers have taken them into different paths. They're all in their 40s or 50s, now they are the who's who in their respective fields, with many scientists and engineers working under them. And they meet after many years at the funeral of their professor. Atleast that would have been believable.
There's no background information about their scientific contributions. We are just told "they're from Oxford, they're young, and working in (insert some science-y sounding words) and so they're the best". That's it!
There is no teamwork. Everyone is a specialist in something. Occasionally one of them goes to the other and says "can you do this for me?", and the other person does it all alone in a computer, like a bunch of fairies waving magic wands. I'm sorry creators of the show, that's not how science and engineering works.
Atleast I could have forgiven the creators if only they introduced these characters any better than how they did. The way they introduce the two ladies in that bar scene, just instantly lowered my expectations for the show. I went in expecting a GoT level show.. Gosh was I so disappointed.. If you're a budding screenwriter reading this review, please remember this: scientists would never talk about themselves in such a bombastic way, especially if they're so early in their careers, and that too to a stranger who's clearly not a scientist himself. Watch Oppenheimer, Arrival, Interstellar, Contact to know how real scientists talk. If that's how you introduce your main characters, it's just an instant turn off. How can we root for a person like that?
There are so many loopholes in the story. Like, why just China figured out how to talk to aliens? Nasa here sending people to the moon and robots to mars and probes to Pluto but couldn't figure out how to send a signal to the sun? And why only this Wong guy and his boss investigate the murders of these scientists? Clearly they're dying everywhere, not just in the UK. A senior scientist in India died by suicide? Yeah let's wait for the never-heard-before detective working for a shady UK govt organization to arrive at the crime scene.
If the aliens are so powerful that they listen to every single conversation happening at every location in the world, and they could cover the entire planet with a weapon the size of a proton, how come they're so dumb as to not find another habitable planet somewhere nearby to their star? With such technology, you don't even need a habitable planet. You can just simply terraform any planet.
And what's with that stupid VR game thing? It's such an elaborate subplot just to reveal the evil plan of the bad guys. I thought bond villains are the worst!
Why slice through an entire ship like a vegetable chopper slicing an onion, just to recover a hard drive? Imagine you're the head of MI6, and you ask your subordinates to come up with a plan for a covert operation to retrieve a hard drive from a cruise ship, and this is the plan your subordinates come up with. This is like letting Peter Griffin device a plan for capturing Bin laden. Just makes no sense at all!
And why choose a high school teacher's brain as your choice for communicating with the aliens? What about the thousands of octogenarians and septuagenarians who spent their entire lives trying to talk to aliens? Surely at least one of them must be in their death beds, and would definitely jump at such an opportunity. As I mentioned earlier, it's like Stranger things met interstellar.
But I just sincerely hope that some of these plot holes are eventually addressed in future seasons. I haven't read the books, so I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt at the moment. If not, even a 3/10 would become too generous of me.
This once again reinforces the belief that Benioff and Weiss are nothing without the genius of GRRM. The moment they start putting their own brains into their creations, their true creativity is visible for everyone to see.