2024-03-24 15:47:54
There are quite a few bad video games and there are many ways to make bad video games. The game can be full of bugs, the gameplay repetitive, the pretension exaggerated. But the most hated reason is a world that is too empty. A great example of this is the zombie game Days Gone which has a brilliant concept: the player travels on a motorcycle across the US in search of his wife. The concept is cool but the world doesn’t feel alive enough. Boring. Most interesting games today are open world games, and the developers can’t afford Empty worlds. And why am I telling you about computer games when it comes to a review for a TV series? Well, because that’s exactly the problem with “The Three-Body Problem”, the new Netflix series. Her world is quite empty, the texts are quite empty and the end of the season is quite empty and anti-climactic.
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The series is based on a trilogy of Chinese science fiction books and follows a number of scientists who graduated from the same class who meet after the suicide of their mentor from Oxford. Along with the parallel investigation of Clarence Chee, a former MI5 agent who investigates the suicides of other scientists when everything revolves around a mysterious helmet, the scientists begin to experience Weird things like visions of a countdown clock and a very realistic virtual reality game, and together they reveal an alien invasion planned to happen hundreds of years into the future.
All of this sounds very exciting on paper, but in practice we get an unbaked series in the end nothing happens. And it’s quite a shame to receive such mediocre content from Netflix after it already managed to bring some brilliance in the last year and seemed to have overcome its tendency for casual content. David Benioff and d. B. Weiss, who are responsible for the “Game of Thrones” disaster, are the creators of the series and their attempt to rise from the dust and soar like the phoenix is palpable, but every time something good happens in the series – something else happens that makes me regret that I started watching it. I really wanted to enjoy the series. And no matter how hard I tried, I didn’t succeed.
Where to start talking about it? From the cheesy dialogues that feel like they came out of “Pacific Rim” and not in a good part? Of the ridiculous solutions that could have appeared just as well in “Armageddon”? Maybe one of the good things in the series, like John Bradley, aka Sam Tarly from “Game of Thrones”, who plays Jack Rooney, a young man who got rich selling sweets and sodas and is part of the group of scientists?
Let’s talk about the world of the game first: the first part of the series is three episodes of exposition, during which a mysterious virtual reality helmet is discovered that puts the wearer into the game, and it is probably the least fun game ever created. Of all the elements of games, Weiss and Benioff chose to take the least interesting elements – a system of stages and a system that allows time to run forward. The goal of the game is to save civilizations on a planet that revolves around three celestial bodies. For this, the players will be forced to measure the movements of the suns, their size and other scientific bullshit.
The game world is empty of content. There is nothing there that indicates civilization except a palace that changes every time, without the slightest understanding of how a modern computer game is built. Maybe it’s appropriate for the aliens in the series, but when you show a computer game on a TV screen it should make the viewer want to play that game, like “Jumanji” and “Tron” made the children of the eighties want to play the games they appeared in. The worst thing is that this concept just dies after a few episodes: the helmet doesn’t contribute much other than being a really cool concept, and they really try to make us buy that it’s essential to the plot. In the middle of the season, you forget about it and move on to the main thing. And the main thing is not better.
Aysa Gonzalez, who plays Auggie Salzer, just throws out action movie slogans and acts like she’s in the 90s, Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) is a rather passive and uninteresting character, and veteran Benedict Wong is perhaps the best thing about the series as Clarence Chee , but he can’t hold the whole series on his shoulders and the rest of the characters are pretty unmemorable. The script is flawed, the directing choices are wrong and only the cinematography and effects manage to generate interest, but it doesn’t feel like the story they’re trying to tell is worth it. A more interesting story could have been produced with the raw material of the book, we could have been made to feel that this journey was worth something, but Weiss and Benioff simply failed.
The ending of the first season was so unsatisfying and so boring, it’s almost bizarre. The conceptual skeleton exists, it’s there, it’s a great concept, a great idea and a great topic to write about. So why not make such a distinct effort? “The Three Body Problem” is simply an open world game with no content. It has a good foundation, which is the idea, but nothing else besides that. Effects and Benedict Wong can’t save a series this bad, just like crappy graphics don’t make up for an empty and boring video game world. As of now, the series has not yet been renewed for another season. If it is renewed, Weiss and Benioff should think carefully about where they are taking the story, because it may not be too late to save this sinking ship. We’d love to prove that it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
>> “The 3 Body Problem”, now on Netflix
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