Sci fi on the screen
Review of Netflix's new Three Body (2024) adaptation and a few words on Interstellar (2014), Fallout (2024), and Neptune Frost (2021)
Three Body (2024)
I did a review of the book, kicking off my sci fi review series, almost exactly a year ago. I also watched the Tencent adaptation of the novel around that time. Now there’s a Netflix adaptation — so I’d thought I’d write down my thoughts on that. Spoilers follow.
Let me say up front that I’ve never had an adaptation cause me to revise my views of the original source material in a negative direction until now. I also was able to determine I made the correct call when I decided I never wanted to watch Game of Thrones. The issue I have with the Netflix series is so-called tonal whiplash (a discussion of the subject on a writing forum here). We have drama, tragedy, extreme violence, and dorky (sometimes comedic) scientific interludes all jumbled together and swinging from one emotion to another every few minutes. Sure — a good story, like real life, can have all of these things. Sometimes it needs all of these things in order to resolve tension to build it again. However, flitting between them like a bee to different flowers is frustrating at best and deleterious to the story at worst.
There’s one episode that has a character distraught, in the aftermath of some horrific violence her scientific work enabled who has some emotional character moments with her friends and then decides to go back to do scientific work for the people who perpetrated that violence — only to quit again. It feels like a horror movie mashed up with a TV drama, blended with a sci fi thriller all in the space of 40 minutes or so. The actor is brilliant at delivering all this the best she can; the writers have set it up to fail through tonal whiplash.
Knives Out (2019) does a kind of genre switch between a detective story and a crime drama and back over the course of two hours. But a) those genres are closely related, and b) it’s over a period of two hours. There’s only a slight tonal shift associated with the changes that helps the movie seem fresh compared to the by-now stale tropes of e.g a Poirot mystery. It doesn’t suffer from tonal whiplash.
The issue for me is this: tonal whiplash happens in the book. It didn’t register with me because when I’ve read the book, it has been over an extended period of time1. You can tell I am wrestling with something in my review:
I found the fake science exposition entertaining ..., but also at times kind of dorky for lack of a better word. It would be risibly pretentious if it weren’t so earnest. It’s hard to pull off and Liu’s earnestness makes the whole book seem like an extended metaphor or an epic fable. The combination of an earnest love of science and scientists with the darkness of the view of human nature seems like it should be in tension. It appears as two sides of a coin, but not much is made of it without feeling like you might be reading too much into the source material.
It is in tension. I just haven’t read the book fast enough for it to fully register. And that tension breaks the feel of an epic fable. I was already calling it flawed in that review due to sexism (which the Netflix series attempts to revise2), but now view its disjoint nature as more than just my own limitations as a reader.
In order to mitigate the tonal whiplash, the Netflix series should have just removed the VR game if it was going to depict the violence3 in the rest of the story. In the book, the game serves three major purposes: 1) explaining the 3-body problem to the readers4, 2) building the rationale for why messing up particle physics experiments could slow science5, and 3) world building and motivation for the San Ti (trisolarans). None but the third need some kind of communication device, and there are alternatives to handling the first two.
First, while being (unfortunately) the title6, it might benefit the TV series to remove the three body problem altogether. Of course, book fans would have had a fit, but a) the three body basis is technically incorrect7 and b) it doesn’t specifically add much to the larger story of the trilogy. It is basically dropped from the rest of the series. The San Ti could easily be motivated to invade by the “dark forest” logic of the later books without a specific rationale. Maybe they turned their planet into an environmental disaster? That would go well with the other themes of Three Body. Environmental disaster on the aliens’ homeworld could just be shown in a visual medium8 without having to resort to a weird (and dated) VR game.
Slowing scientific progress is a major theme of the first book in the Three Body trilogy. It establishes some tension in the conflict between humans and the San Ti. The San Ti are far more advanced than humans, but are 400 years away — so if science progresses then humans will become more advanced than the San Ti by the time they arrive9. However the later books (and the Netflix series) develop all kinds of new technology — completely deflating this theme. Given the limited time for all the plot elements and character development, it might be best to drop this as well.
What’s left? There’s the Chinese cultural revolution10, environmentalism, and the question of whether it might be better if aliens came to fix our planet and species. Tell Ye Wenjie’s personal story as tied up in those themes. There’s dramatic irony given the aliens may have destroyed the environment of their homeworld. Pull the “dark forest” theme to the forefront and make a parallel with speaking up in a totalitarian regime. Call it Silent Spring (in reference to Rachel Carson’s book referenced in Liu’s book) or something similar instead of Three Body. Silent Forest? Just The Dark Forest? Play to the strengths of the visual medium instead of playing a game of cramming the source material into a few hour-long TV episodes with a few changes.
A couple of random notes that didn’t fit in the review above:
It was interesting how differently the Tencent series and the Netflix series treated the zither scene compared to the book. In the book, Wang grapples with the fact that people on the boat who might just be hired workers will die. It’s the “contractors on the Death Star” philosophical problem from Clerks (1994). The Tencent series made all of the people on the boat into murderers, largely removing the ethical problem and showing the death from a distance. The Netflix series adds children to the boat, and shows death in far more gruesome detail. It’s horrific and I almost stopped watching. The Netflix series also makes people aware something is happening in order to have characters flee in fear — but this ruins the entire point of the zither which was to have something that killed everyone on the ship without anyone knowing what was happening. If they could see what was happening, then the people on the boat could delete the data that was being sought.
The Netflix series makes the sky flash in the visible spectrum which everyone on Earth sees. The book has the CMB temperature fluctuate around its 3 K mean value so only scientists monitoring it can see it happening. Not sure which is better here — just noting a difference. Having everyone on Earth see the flashing does help motivate the global response that follows.
Fallout (2024)
Amazon Prime made series based on the Fallout video game franchise. It suffers from the same tonal whiplash problems of Three Body (2024). Again, these tonal whiplash problems are inherent in the source material. The video game has jokey 50s retro futurism coupled with serious violence. When you’re playing the game, though, you have some control over what you are getting into. The game is also not live action — the limited polygons create emotional distance. The show just goes from hokey 50s nuclear aesthetic with a dramatically ironic upbeat attitude to gruesome violence and back every ten minutes or so. I had to turn it off when they threw a puppy in an incinerator. It’s just fucked up for being fucked up’s sake.
Interstellar (2014)
I never got around to watching Interstellar until earlier this year. Like most Christopher Nolan films, it feels completely sterile except for the actors’ performances so Interstellar generally lives or dies based on them. Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway deliver the emotional throughline of the story extremely well — something of a surprise for me in the case of the former. I did enjoy Matt Damon’s portrayal of a total sociopath, but it did push me back into the bleakness in much of Nolan’s work. Everyone else is mid. Scientific consultant Kip Thorne is one of the authors of “the phone book11” and the scientific basis of the plot in Interstellar is only mildly more entertaining. The space stuff generally looks good, but I do not understand why they initially have to take off using a staged rocket when they apparently have an ion-engine vehicle that can take off from the surface of a planet Star Wars-style. Also — that planet appears to have massive solitons that are erroneously considered to be tides generated by its proximity to a black hole. That, or people don’t know how tides work.
Neptune Frost (2021)
I cannot do this Afrofuturist film justice, so I’ll just say it is wildly creative — a novel energy that sci fi on the screen desperately needs.
I have a day job and a family, so the time I can devote to reading for pleasure is fairly limited.
One of the early scenes does play directly into a gender-normative / sexist trope. In an attempt to mitigate the source materials sexism, the series turns the protagonist of the first book, Wang Miao, into multiple protagonists, male and female. Two of the women are physicists at a bar — they are approached by a man attempting to chat them up. They reveal that they are physicists and detail their work, and the man gives up and walks away. “Men aren’t interested in women who are smarter / more successful than they are” is a trope as derived from sexism as any other. Now I’m sure the intention was to show the female protagonists as accomplished scientists in order to provide evidence that series isn’t sexist. But that’s what Liu does in his book. The women are all super-intelligent. The problem with Liu’s book is not 1950s sexism where women can’t be scientists; the problem is that all the women are devious. The Netflix series avoids this more pernicious sexism in the most superficial way possible — by changing genders of characters or splitting them into multiple characters of varying gender.
I think the creators might have realized this and so added more gruesome violence to the VR game to try to mitigate tonal whiplash to some degree.
This is the worst part for me — the physicists going into the VR game should immediately know Newton’s gravitational equations for three masses are in general chaotic.
The thing is that the particle physics that’s being messed up in Three Body (2014 or 2024) is basically the same field that in the real world hasn’t produced much of anything beyond the standard model in multiple decades. There’s a ton of writing out there about the stagnation in particle physics and accelerator experiments. We’re living in the world the fictional sophons are supposed to be creating. Science is still moving forward.
There is sci fi precedent for completely changing the title of a work in the film it was based on — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? becomes Blade Runner.
The Alpha Centauri system the San Ti are fictionally from isn’t a chaotic three body system. It is a binary star with a third, distant, companion for which Newton’s laws work about as well as they do for our solar system.
I’d like to take a step back and talk a bit about point of view (POV). Three Body (2014) is written in third person limited, but with multiple POV characters. We eventually get a San Ti POV towards the end of the book, but the early chapters focus on the POV of Wang Miao (in the present) and Ye Wenjie (in the past). A written work (limiting myself to English) benefits from a consistent treatment of the POV — if only to keep the references of the written pronouns I, you, or they clear (first, second, or third person, respectively). Third person can be limited (i.e. only stuff the main character(s) know or see is presented) or omniscient (the narrator can go anywhere, see anything). There are additional complications with respect to who is narrating that I won’t bog down this footnote with. First person or third person limited with a small number of POV main characters helps the reader become more emotionally connected to those main characters. Film also has point of view (is the camera showing a character’s perspective, or the director’s perspective), but can change a lot more simply because a lot more information can be conveyed by a series of images compared to a lines of text. The opening scene of The Empire Strikes Back goes from the director’s perspective of the Empire, to a 3rd person limited POV of the imperial probe droid, to Luke’s perspective, to a 3rd person limited POV of Luke, to a 3rd person limited POV of Han, back to Luke’s perspective, then to a 3rd person limited POV of the wampa in under two minutes. If these were the opening pages of a book, they would be a mess. Obviously it would be 3rd person omniscient, but without “telling” (“Luke heroically surveys the horizon”) that POV would put such distance between the reader and the characters (are we supposed to empathize with the empire? the droid? Luke? Han?) it would take several more pages to establish what a reader is supposed to take away from the scene. (This is not to say that 3rd person omniscient can’t be done; it just takes an excellent writer.) My main point here is that Three Body (2024) should have abandoned the shackles of the two character 3rd person limited POV of the book more thoroughly.
No idea why the San Ti can’t work on science en route — time dilation at 0.01 c is negligible and they are no longer suffering from the effects of their chaotic solar system.
These views of the past are the best scenes in the entire series.
In case you didn’t know: I have a Phd in theoretical physics. I was more on the quarks side of things, but of course occasionally referenced MTW — a 1200+ page book of similar scale to a Yellow Pages phone book of yore.