3 Body Problem (Netflix Season One)
Apr. 5th, 2024 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
primeidealI'm not going to get into the discourse or pros or cons of the casting choices. Is the characterization particularly deep? No. Was the characterization in the books particularly deep either? Also no. I wasn't taking notes as I went so this is just random thoughts on stuff that I'm remembering.
-"Time is a motherfucker." Honestly? I think that does a good job at getting across the spirit (if not the letter) of the books, "Death's End" in particular.
-Early-show Will is a total nothingburger...but then when I think about it, Yun Tianming at the same point in the books was also kind of a nothingburger, it was just a lot more compelling when he was the only game in town in contrast to "Jin and Jack are researching the videogame, and Will is...sick on the train."
-Getting to see the "video game" on screen is so cool. The pyramids! The wacky historical costumes! Rehydrating! The human computer! Three suns!
-When Ye Wenjie tells Jin "this headset was Vera's" I was like "yessss, called it in my fic," but then that turned out to be just a decoy :(
-The flashback/Red Coast scenes with Ye Wenjie were also very well done.
-"Entrepreneur isn't a job, that's just a word you learned how to pronounce" hahaha Da Shi.
-I do think that they should have included more of the Lei Zhicheng and Yang Weining stuff from the book, instead of making Evans Vera's father. I think that's important in portraying Ye Wenjie and how ruthless of a person she's become by that point.
-I loved the first part of the "fairy tale" scene in Episode Four ("is the wolf there? Can we talk to him?") Great send-up of theory of mind, and ties in well with Will-Tianming's stuff later. I do think that the dialogue escalating to "oh no we fear you and won't talk to you anymore" all at once was a little abrupt. I know they tried to pace it out and set it up with Hansel and Gretel before but I think it would have been stronger if the first half was its own scene and then they'd come back to the "oh no."
-Overall I think the first half was stronger than the second half, the video game world is more playful/whimsical than humans sitting around brooding, even if they're brooding about spaceships. Even the flashbacks are brutal and obviously not "fun," but they still feel "different from the present" in a way that the later stuff doesn't as much.
-Changing the pacing so that there were almost three episodes between "you're bugs!" and Da Shi's interpretation of that scene was painful, it's like "come on, you can't possibly skip that, can you? When are we gonna get to it." Probably less annoying for people who haven't read the book, or on a rewatch. :p
-"We need someone smart and brave, someone like the people in this room." "I'll do it, I'll go!" "stfu Edgar." Haha, Wade moments.
-Saul gets better when he had more to do in the last couple episodes. The whole "I'm not a Wallfacer"/"yes sir" routine was amusing, along the lines of Paul being hailed as the Mahdi in Dune Part Two...or Prince Jake.
-I still haven't watched the Tencent (longer, Chinese-language, hews closer to the books in terms of keeping Wang Miao an individual character but trying to give him more of a personality) adaptation. Maybe I need to do that, or maybe I can just magically force people to get into the show so they can get into the books. (Okay, this is definitely a "be careful what you wish for" thing.)
-"Time is a motherfucker." Honestly? I think that does a good job at getting across the spirit (if not the letter) of the books, "Death's End" in particular.
-Early-show Will is a total nothingburger...but then when I think about it, Yun Tianming at the same point in the books was also kind of a nothingburger, it was just a lot more compelling when he was the only game in town in contrast to "Jin and Jack are researching the videogame, and Will is...sick on the train."
-Getting to see the "video game" on screen is so cool. The pyramids! The wacky historical costumes! Rehydrating! The human computer! Three suns!
-When Ye Wenjie tells Jin "this headset was Vera's" I was like "yessss, called it in my fic," but then that turned out to be just a decoy :(
-The flashback/Red Coast scenes with Ye Wenjie were also very well done.
-"Entrepreneur isn't a job, that's just a word you learned how to pronounce" hahaha Da Shi.
-I do think that they should have included more of the Lei Zhicheng and Yang Weining stuff from the book, instead of making Evans Vera's father. I think that's important in portraying Ye Wenjie and how ruthless of a person she's become by that point.
-I loved the first part of the "fairy tale" scene in Episode Four ("is the wolf there? Can we talk to him?") Great send-up of theory of mind, and ties in well with Will-Tianming's stuff later. I do think that the dialogue escalating to "oh no we fear you and won't talk to you anymore" all at once was a little abrupt. I know they tried to pace it out and set it up with Hansel and Gretel before but I think it would have been stronger if the first half was its own scene and then they'd come back to the "oh no."
-Overall I think the first half was stronger than the second half, the video game world is more playful/whimsical than humans sitting around brooding, even if they're brooding about spaceships. Even the flashbacks are brutal and obviously not "fun," but they still feel "different from the present" in a way that the later stuff doesn't as much.
-Changing the pacing so that there were almost three episodes between "you're bugs!" and Da Shi's interpretation of that scene was painful, it's like "come on, you can't possibly skip that, can you? When are we gonna get to it." Probably less annoying for people who haven't read the book, or on a rewatch. :p
-"We need someone smart and brave, someone like the people in this room." "I'll do it, I'll go!" "stfu Edgar." Haha, Wade moments.
-Saul gets better when he had more to do in the last couple episodes. The whole "I'm not a Wallfacer"/"yes sir" routine was amusing, along the lines of Paul being hailed as the Mahdi in Dune Part Two...or Prince Jake.
-I still haven't watched the Tencent (longer, Chinese-language, hews closer to the books in terms of keeping Wang Miao an individual character but trying to give him more of a personality) adaptation. Maybe I need to do that, or maybe I can just magically force people to get into the show so they can get into the books. (Okay, this is definitely a "be careful what you wish for" thing.)
