104
Netflix's Three Body Problem is Unwatchable (hexbear.net)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
132 comments fedilink hide all child comments

It's like someone asked ChatGPT to turn the book into a dumb anglo sitcom.

-Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the 'friends' act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They're constantly insulting or hitting each other. It's just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.

-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.

-Single characters from the book have been unnecessarily split into multiple new characters adding nothing to the story.

-The story is a cosmic horror but comedy and romance have been forced in for no reason whatsoever except as filler, which is even more mind-boggling because they've essentially rushed all of the good stuff in the book to make room for unfunny jokes.

-Apparently they could barely afford any sets and extras, so scenes and locations that are supposed to be bristling with sights and people just feel oddly empty. Even the special effects feel muted. The budget is just weirdly limited, and the show looks much cheaper than the Tencent series.

-Almost all of the science (which is the interesting stuff) has been gutted from this science fiction.

I hate anglo slop. Where is the kino. Tencent pls adapt The Dark Forest.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] [email protected] 52 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the 'friends' act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They're constantly insulting or hitting each other. It's just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.

-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.

Does every netflix adaptation get written by the same exact people?

[-] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago

I don't know if they all go to the same writing school but my hypothesis is that this is how writing schools are teaching everyone to write stories these days. It's everywhere.

[-] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago

My money is on it being focus group/analysis/exec driven. Makes more sense as a common denominator.

[-] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

Could also be because the showrunners are Benioff and Weiss, who got addicted to cliffhangers and shock value to keep increasing Game of Thrones viewership.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

I blame the MCU for this. It was always a thing, but the Marvel movies turned it up to 11 and made bank off it

[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Does every netflix adaptation get written by the same exact people

Yes, the data from Netflix's user base and algorithm basically writes the episodes. That's how Netflix's version of House Of Cards with Kevin Spacey was made. They just jammed all the most popular stuff, according to Netflix user data, into one show, and that's how House Of Cards was mad. That's why all these similarities in Netflix shows exist. With AI it's just going to get worse. We're officially in the era of algorithically driven shows.

[-] [email protected] 44 points 5 months ago

None of the 'friends' act like friends.

nobody remembers what friends were like

[-] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's bad folks

The Chinese tv show has 30 episodes. Meanwhile 5 episodes into the Netflix series and the story is already farther along than the entire Chinese first season . This is not an exaggeration.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

Is Nexflix doing the whole trilogy? In a miniseries basically?

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

The Chinese tv show has 30 episodes. Meanwhile 5 episodes into the Netflix series and the story is already farther along than the entire Chinese first season .

Average nextfix series moment

load more comments (2 replies)
[-] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago

I could watch it, but the pacing really is a problem. The show rushes out answers to questions that it would have been fun to have some time to think about. Also, really egregious use of CGI for things they really shouldn't have to use it for. The not being able to afford extras thing seems very apparent there as well. In an army of 30 million of course you're going to have to use CGI, but standard practice would be to have the first rank of soldiers - the ones really close to the camera - be played by real people. No such luck here I'm afraid.

[-] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago

The show rushes out answers to questions that it would have been fun to have some time to think about.

The new Percy Jackson series did this too. There is lots to praise about the new adaptation, but the plot feels rushed, propelled forth by characters having sudden realisations multiple times per episode.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

the live action ATLA also has similar problems.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

The rehydration scene is supposed to feature millions of Trisolarans. There's like 10 on screen.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

They did have the millions of soldiers for the computer lol, but the rehydration scene was just an excuse to awooga afaic

[-] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago

The TenCent series does some things better, does some things worse. Netflix arguably had better character chemistry. Three Body Problem is a good story, but its message is a bad one, if humans encounter aliens and the first thing we do is not bring up communism than that’s unrealistic sci-fi.

[-] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

By chemistry you mean everyone constantly saying "shut the fuck up" and elbowing or punching each other? It's just toxic.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago

Is it a good story? I found it impossible to read and the plot summary didn't suggest anything thought-provoking

[-] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

I finished it but just barely, rolling my eyes the whole time. I guess it's supposed to be insightful about Chinese attitudes towards geopolitics if you finish the series, but the first book was dull and the interesting ideas were marred by being almost pure magic with barely a pretense of science to make them work.

The dark forest doesn't apply in real life, and as a thought experiment doesn't hold up either. I recently declared it to be another example of techbros re-inventing pascal's wager.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago

I've looked up what the ending of the books is and it sounds like the main conflict is resolved via deus ex machina and then everyone dies anyway so nothing that happened mattered at all

[-] [email protected] 29 points 5 months ago

Yup. And the only reason any of the plot can even happen is totally bogus space magic that's so silly you can't even call it soft sci-fi. I gave up after the first book, and I really have nothing good to say about it. I've heard people opine that it was a lot of people's first science fiction book the same way Harry Potter was a lot of kids first fantasy adventure book, and that's why it had such an impact.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

Yeah I hear it's about collapsing spatial dimensions as if reality itself is a perfect 1:1 copy of our simplified understanding of it (math) and it's done with technology that's super advanced so it never has to actually be described or follow conservation of energy or anything

Plus the entire premise seems to be a nihilistic parable about how fascism is right and you need to wipe out rival civilizations before they even know you exist, or they'll do the same to you

[-] [email protected] 31 points 5 months ago

Plus the entire premise seems to be a nihilistic parable about how fascism is right and you need to wipe out rival civilizations before they even know you exist, or they'll do the same to you

I see this take all the time here, and then when I (a person who read the book) counter that it's a Sci-Fi parable about Chinese foreign policy from the perspective of the Chinese (you need to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself or the evil ~~Trisolarans~~ American Empire will come get you, humanity is the China stand in in the novel) white people yell at me for being some kind of asian chauvinist.

[-] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago

I have a theory that Westerners from the imperial core think of the Dark Forest and automatically put themselves in the Trisolarian imperialist POV, and are ideologically incapable of switching that POV to the side of the victims of imperialism. That’s the only way I can explain how they could have come away with that conclusion.

[-] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago

Nah, I'm not gonna be as uncharitable as all that (beyond the snark in my original post). Online western leftists have diegetic essentialism built into them as a survival mechanism, so when chuds deliberately push their reading of dark forest theory (and to be fair, it is very easy to see how Game Theory Law of the Jungle, Kill or Be Killed can be read that way) it sets off their Hitler particle detectors. I don't blame them as it's probably the most common take they'd encounter online.

The defensive realpolitik 'Keep your Head Down' reading is only apparent if you're familiar with China's recent history and foreign policy decisions post-Deng.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (14 replies)
[-] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'll fully cop to not having read the book and thus not knowing about the nuances, but Dark Forest existed as a proposed answer to the Fermi Paradox well before Three Body Problem was written, and I really do think people need to examine the mindset that leads someone to theorize that the reason we don't hear from other civilizations is that any attempts to contact another one results in immediate annihilation. This shit doesn't form in a vacuum.

It just sounds like there's enough little nitpicky things in the books that they'll bother me, and I don't need my brain chasing down more loose ends to ruminate over. I am still pissed about how shitty His Dark Materials was after hearing all the praise it got, and it's been damn near 20 years. I can't get those plot holes out of my head. Parts of me are still mad at them.

Cringe? Maybe. I don't really give a fuck if people think I'm cringe anymore.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

Hey, look, as a person living in a glass house I'm not about to just start throwing cringe stones everywhere, but imo I think we should be really clear on whether we're discussing the Three Body Problem (the book/tv show) or The Dark Forest Theory (the thought experiment), because there absolutely are legitimate criticisms of both of those things, but we kinda need to be careful not to conflate the two, because the chief concern of the book is the question "Is it possible for China to not get colonised by a technologically superior foe?", which is somewhat related but quite a bit different from the "The Reason we don't hear from aliens is because everyone's really mean".

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments (14 replies)
[-] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago

I love how Hexbears just make up their minds about what they think of the works they never even bothered to read lol. Never change.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago

writing three paragraphs criticizing the plot of a book you won't read

load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments (15 replies)
[-] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

it's a better horror story than a sci-fi story

[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

I guess, but the sciencyness being so silly didn't work for me. Lovecraft style cosmic horror just straight up says "there are weird aliens who are totally bizarre and incomprehensible and they do psychic space magic for reasons your pathetic mammal brain will never understand and even a glancing encounter with them is so strange it will destroy your mind" and i can get behind that because it's fun silly.

This is just "hey, what if your neighbors were total assholes?"

Once the sophons show up there's no tension for the rest of the story bc it's just like "oh, the trisolarans have magic and can do anything they want no matter how little sense it makes." Like a big part of horror is gradually figuring out what the enemy is and realizing how totally fucked you are, but the sophons aren't possible and don't follow any physical rules so it's just like "welp, guess we're fucked then".

I always compare it to revelation space, another story that explores the Dark Forest idea.

spoilerThe Wolves in Revelation Space are real fucking weird, but you get deep, deep in to the story before you really even get the edges of what they are and what they're really capable of. The first book in the series is full of rapidly escalating "oh shit moments as the scale of how totally fucked everything is ratchets up again and again and again. The bad guys have a lot of space-magic that definitely does not agree with physics, but they're also up against fairly hard limits - lightspeed travel takes a long time, ftl is impossible, even the super-high tech alien spookies still need to respect conservation of energy. When they finally pull out their trump card it's the scale that is completely horrifying.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[-] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago

But we need to boost this series though, otherwise we will never see a rendition of the far future where every man on earth is a femboy.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

There was really a bunch of weird stuff in Death's End about how this or that era could "produce real men" or not. Hard times and soft times cycle level stuff.

[-] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago

Ikr lmao the justification for it is evidence they allow reddit in china: "bro just trust me, the more advanced soyciety becomes, the more effeminate the men get due to a lack of necessity for manual labor, just trust me bro..."

I mean I wouldnt mind living in a time where all the men wore makeup and dressed all cute, boggles one's mind how the author tried to make this out to be a bad thing lol

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[-] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago

monkey's paw curls

The Daily Wire adapts it and quadruples down on the misogyny.

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I don’t understand how they could fuck it up so badly.

I was willing to give the show creators a chance and even had a lot of expectations from them because the first few seasons of GoT were great, but here it’s like they don’t understand the source materials and don’t know how to tell a good story at all (no tension, no buildups). The “Who has a better story than Bran” meme sounds so fitting now that I’ve seen what they have done to the TBP.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

Endless trash

[-] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

what do you want to bet they actually used chatgpt to write this

[-] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago

It easily could be. The other problem is that it's so obviously a product of focus groups of soccer moms and lib millennials. They try so hard to make things with something for everybody, e.g. comedy, romance, action, thriller, scifi, fantasy all mashed into ONE film/show and it's just a fucking mess. STOP trying to please everyone. Not every film/show has to be watched by three billion people.

[-] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago

it's extremely funny because one piece LA was their most watched show for awhile (may still be) and it straight up said haha eff you this is anime rubberman bullshit all the way down - and that's what brought in people who'd never consider watching a 1k episode anime (myself included). these studios will never learn that genuine love for the source material and an earnest attempt to do it justice draws in so many more eyes than cheap, patronizing pandering that barely conceals the studio's contempt for their audience.

[-] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

Correct opinion

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
104 points (100.0% liked)

movies

22542 readers
42 users here now

Rules for Movies & TV Discussion

  1. Any discussion of Disney properties should contain a (cw: imperialism) tag. If your post isn't tagged appropriately it will be removed.

  2. Anti-Bong Joon-ho trolling will result in an immediate ban from c/movies and submitted to the site administrators for review.

  3. On Star Trek Sunday only posts discussing how we might achieve space communism are permitted. Non-Star Trek related content will be removed and you will be temporarily banned until the following Sunday.

Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.

AVATAR 3

Perverts Guide to Ideology

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]