3 Body Problem review: "A solid sci-fi premise is weighed down by a clunky script"
Mar. 9, 20243 Body Problem finds its feet in its final few episodes as it fully commits to the sci-fi elements of the story, moving away from interpersonal (and, often, inconsequential) character drama – it’s just a shame it takes so long to get there.
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David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' first post-Game of Thrones project was always going to have a lot to live up to. Their HBO fantasy epic was a critical and commercial success – until it wasn’t. The beloved long-running series suffered from a massively unpopular final season, so the showrunners walk a difficult line: audiences know what they’re capable of at their best, but also their worst. No pressure, then.
For Netflix’s 3 Body Problem, the pair teamed up with Alexander Woo, whose previous TV work includes writing and producing for shows like True Blood and The Terror. And they had a lot on their plate: the show is an adaptation of the award-winning Chinese novel ‘The Three-Body Problem’ by engineer-turned-author Liu Cixin, which is the first part in a multi-timeline trilogy.
The story starts off in ’60s China in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, as a young woman, Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), watches her physicist father publicly and brutally beaten to death. Soon after, we’re introduced to a group of characters in present-day London: five scientists who are reunited after their former Oxford professor, Vera (Vedette Lim), dies by suicide.
There’s Augustina, or Auggie (Eiza González), who founded a groundbreaking nanotechnology company, Saul (Jovan Adepo), Vera’s research assistant, whose latest project stalled right before her death after it started to produce nonsensical data, Jin (Jess Hong), a talented theoretical physicist, Will (Alex Sharp), a shy science teacher, and Jack (John Bradley), a millionaire who dropped out of their university course to start a snack business – and, presumably, get much, much more annoying.
But back to the plot. Soon after Vera’s death, Auggie starts to see a flashing countdown seemingly seared onto her retinas – and it transpires that she’s not the only one. No-nonsense intelligence agent Clarence (Benedict Wong) is investigating a string of scientist suicides around the world for a mysterious intelligence organization and during one of his site visits we see a countdown scrawled across the walls of a recently deceased professor. Auggie’s affliction comes to his attention, and Clarence starts keeping a close eye on the group.
Wong is trying his best as Clarence, giving one of the show’s strongest performances and generating genuine laughs with his delivery. Clarence’s boss, Wade (Liam Cunningham), however, is Life on Mars' Gene Hunt on steroids, throwing out swear words and slurs in a way that gets tiresome pretty fast. It’s not just Wade afflicted with this, either: clunky dialogue functioning as exposition plagues the entire series. And let’s be honest, the only actor I want to hear seriously deliver a line like “science is broken” is Jason Statham.
The series finds its feet in the final few episodes as it fully commits to the sci-fi elements of the story, moving away from interpersonal (and, often, inconsequential) character drama and actually bringing its key players into the story. There’s a handful of truly chilling sequences and one particularly jaw-dropping scene (none of which we’re allowed to go into any more detail about here) in the last three episodes – the stakes finally feel lofty enough to match the world-changing subject material, which makes it a hell of a lot easier to tag along for the ride. It’s just a shame it takes so long to get there.
3 Body Problem arrives on Netflix on March 21. In the meantime, check out our picks of thebest Netflix showsstreaming now.
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I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.
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