Review of the series 3 Body problem

The science fiction series 3 Body problem, based on the literary trilogy Memory of the Earth’s Past by the most popular Chinese science fiction writer Liu Qixin, was developed by the same tandem of American writers and showrunners, (from Game of Thrones, the actor John Bradley, who played Sam Tarly, fantasy, references to past eras and civilizations, and the word “game” itself, as the characters play a mysteriously realistic virtual game).

Last year, Chinese television producers produced and broadcast the series Three Bodies (Three Bodies or The Problem of Three Bodies is the title of the first novel in the trilogy, which fans usually refer to as the entire cycle). The show received the widest possible recognition and absolute admiration among Chinese viewers, and not only the general public or even maniacal fans of the original source, but also Chinese critics were delighted, especially with the visual effects and the accuracy of the novels. In contrast, Western reviewers, while agreeing with the respectful and accurate adherence to the original text, nevertheless considered the production and performance, including the acting, to be below international class.

Therefore, since the Chinese adaptation was predominantly local and localized, the version of 2024 by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss should not be considered an unnecessary manifestation of Hollywood. On the contrary, the American screenwriters did not Americanize or Hollywoodize Liu Qixin’s books, but created an international version, expanding the locations and ethnic diversity of the characters. It turned out to be really large-scale and epic, pretentious and at the same time audience-friendly, similar to Cloud Atlas, but more thoughtful, scientific, complex, and realistic.

The story begins with the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966. The Communists publicly kill a physicist for teaching Einstein’s theory of relativity because Einstein “sold out to the Americans and helped create the atomic bomb.” His daughter, also a physicist, disillusioned with the revolution and her mother, who betrayed her father and joined Mao Zedong’s movement, eventually finds herself involved in the secret military project Red Bank, the essence of which is for the Chinese to successfully and efficiently send messages to the universe and establish contact with an alien civilization faster than the Americans and Russians in the space race.

The clever girl finds out that earthlings have already received a signal from aliens that was sent from Jupiter, but not directly, but through the Sun, because the solar power significantly amplified it and eventually delivered it to Earth. So, seeing the problem of many years of cosmic silence instead of responding to the invitation to communicate in the weakness of the Earth’s message, which is “inaudible,” she proposes to use the energy of the Sun as an intermediary, but the communist savages, fixated on ideological symbols, disown the potentially effective scheme only because the “red giant” (red!) must not be touched in any way, because “everyone will be shot.” And then the girl, to whom the future of humanity seems vague and, in fact, completely dark, desperately sends a signal herself…

In parallel, events unfold in the present day. Here, a police investigator (Dr. Strange star Benedict Wong) tries to solve a mysterious case of a series of suicides among scientists and eventually finds out that the world’s leading physicists receive a mysterious anonymous message counting down to the moment when they will… die unless they agree to stop their scientific work. In particular, the most progressive nanotechnology developer (Aisa Gonzalez) receives such a timer message, who is asked by a strange stranger on the street to look at the sky at midnight… and then the starry sky starts flashing at exactly the right time, as if to “wink”, as if to send a coded message in Morse code…

Meanwhile, the developer’s friend, who recently attended the funeral of a colleague (also a scientist who committed suicide and before that had thought about the existence of God), talks to the deceased’s mother (a mother who was the girl who sent the aliens a “telegram” with the help of the Sun, who used the sun to send a “telegram” to the aliens), she finds out that before she died, she was playing a VR game (a game of unknown production, without any labels or buttons, which only requires a silver helmet to start) and takes the miracle device home. Putting on the helmet, she finds herself in the bizarre world of an alien civilization that is dying of excessive heat or excessive cold due to the chaotic movement of the Sun, and the player’s task is to solve the “three-body problem” to help the civilization survive…

Yes, Liu Qixin’s story is a complicated puzzle and a rather colorful mosaic; a puzzle that contains the greatest questions of humanity: what or who is beyond science, a mystical force like God or other worlds with different physical data that earthly science has not yet grown to understand? “The Three-Body Problem approaches the topic, which has already been touched upon in both Marvel and DC comics, exclusively from a scientific perspective, exclusively from the standpoint of real quantum physics, from the starting point of that boundary which should be called the balance between physics and philosophy (and the pillars of this boundary, on which all science fiction about the relativity of time and space and about multiverses stands, of course, are Einstein’s theory and the “poor” Schrödinger’s cat, alive and dead at the same time).

The 3 Body Problem series is as intriguing as it gets. After all, it doesn’t try to be dynamic and impressive from a visual point of view with action alone, and it doesn’t turn into a masquerade, as the aforementioned Cloud Atlas did. It moves slowly and at the same time very intensely along the vector of a sci-fi detective story, and unlike most sci-fi projects, in which fiction significantly prevails over science, it emphasizes the first part of this boundary definition. And by the way, the participation of Benedict Wong is definitely not accidental and looks like an ironic allusion, because in Marvel comics his character has repeatedly dealt with the multiverse and manipulated time and space.

The problem of the end of civilization, which is solved by a player of a virtual game (which is clearly not just a game), in the real world today also sounds like a much less fiction word than ever before. And the threatening Sun, which rises too high, comes too close and burns too brightly, following many of last year’s films (including, of course, Oppenheimer and Asteroid City) and some TV series (The Bunker), reminds us of not so much a panicked but a quiet and “domesticated” feeling of anxious powerlessness in the face of a large deadly outbreak (only here, as in the game, we can’t just dehydrate from that sun, curl up into a rug, and then, under favorable circumstances, turn around and fill up with water again and come to life). However, a banal fourth-stage cancer can be no less of a “flash,” albeit on an individual basis.

If the stars suddenly “wink” and this is categorically contrary to science (at least the science we know today), does this mean that God is sitting somewhere up there? It is interesting that one of the characters, also a deeply manic physicist, calls the phenomenon of flashing stars at midnight, which is so almost irrefutably similar to the message, a “deepfake.” A grandiose dipfake, behind which there is an extremely powerful anti-scientific force. And it also sounds like a hyperbolic reflection of the real world, when dipshits are becoming the main tool of the so-called global SIO (special information operations) and, in general, the main tool of a policy that envisages a planned “alien attack” and is well aware that the attacked will be divided into those who will welcome the alien invaders and those who will fight.