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Finished this after being moderately hyped about it. Kind of a mixed bag, a lot of good stuff but had some pretty glaring flaws that soured the experience a bit for me. Glad it seems like I might be in the minority with this, not sure if I'm just being overly critical or not. I watched with someone who hadn't read the books, felt like I had to do a bit too much adding context on behalf of the show regarding some things that fell really flat for them, which IMO didn't feel like a great sign for an adaptation. They liked it a lot less than I did so I'm not sure if being familiar with the books might have helped with some of the pacing issues? The pacing was way off, it felt like we blitzed through all the "mystery" that existed in the books... I expected there to be more a slow burn to give time for character building to happen more naturally alongside the investigation. Instead the show would just hit the brakes here and there to dump 20 minutes of pure relationship drama, and then core plot questions would get resolved in a single dialogue sequence. Critical parts of the plot felt like they got less weight than the dinner sequence. The titular "three-body problem" was almost comical how breathlessly they zoomed past it & the entire "game" arc. Having the very forced scenes with the guy sitting watching them at the bank of monitors felt like a very unnecessary early defusal of any tension about the origin of the game, when we really didn't need further hints about what was going on yet. Ye Wenjie's side of the story was also pretty flat though I did like the adaptations of the scenes they did cover. Most of the performances & actor choices were solid to great, and some of the new additions that came with them were well done attempts to spice up how dry the original could get. However, almost everything to do with Auggie was insufferable. I'm not sure if it was the acting, the writing, or both, but she just felt really offputting compared to everyone else on set. During all their group scenes I "bought" everyone else but she just kept bringing either way too much or too little drama to the line delivery... came across really juvenile. This would've been fine if done in a way that felt like it worked for the character, but it didn't. It felt like they added the character halfway through production and then had to plug her in wherever they could. The nanowire plot could have easily been given to any of the other Oxford characters without changing much, and her plot with Saul was pretty pointless. His personal arc could've still happened without it. Felt very notably off, the other person watching with me audibly groaned when she showed back up on screen after the first couple episodes. Being only 8 episodes, there just wasn't the time to spare for the misplaced focus considering how much they were trying to do. IMO it would have been of great benefit to do a longer season. It would be cool to see a second season, but I don't know if this show has the mass appeal to bring in the numbers Netflix wants. Hopefully I'm wrong, and if so I'd love to see a more focused follow-up!
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Mar 22, 2024 16:11
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Steve Yun posted:I’m seeing some complaints coming from Chinese social media that if they were gonna westernize the cast, they should have completely westernized it instead of having it partially Chinese. According to them, the effect of keeping Ye Wenjie and the Angry Commies is putting China in a bad light and making the westerners the heroes who have to fix the problems the Chinese caused you'd think with aliens invading somebody over there would at least have something to do I have also unfortunately also seen the worst people online using the Cultural Revolution segment of the show show as "Evil, Inscrutable Chinese" fuel already which is fun realistically the easier solution than trying to find an equal historical tragedy touchstone (which would more likely just invite some other new set of problems) would have just to have had a more international cast of characters in general and include at least one modern day Chinese person who isn't an antagonist, instead of having literally all the good guy scientists who do anything of note be best friends from school who hang out at their sitcom cabin together, but I guess that would've been harder to establish character drama for and/or schedule and/or require more sets
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Mar 22, 2024 17:55
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