The Global Spectacle of Netflix’s 3 Body Problem

Liu Cixin’s 刘慈欣 2006 novel, The Three-Body Problem 三体, first found a global audience through the publication of Ken Liu’s English translation in 2014. The novel, the first in a trilogy collectively known as Remembrance of Earth’s Past 地球往事, would become the first Chinese story to win a Hugo Award in 2015,¹ and for the last decade has served not just as a landmark for the emergence of the burgeoning science fiction genre in contemporary China, but also as a rare measure for the global reach of popular culture from the People’s Republic. Efforts to adapt The Three-Body Problem to visual media repeatedly faltered² (the most successful was a 2014 Minecraft adaptation³ originally uploaded to Bilibili⁴ ), in part because doing justice to a plot that includes advanced theories in astrophysics and nanotech, a virtual reality of recurring apocalypses, and an alien invasion that spans galaxies and centuries would require an enormous budget and innovative special effects. (How, for example, do you film a “sophon” 智子, the aliens’ proton-sized supercomputers that unfold across 11 dimensions?) The story’s reputation for being unfilmable,⁵ it seemed, only served to increase the pressure to produce what was already being conceived as the “Chinese Star Wars.”⁶

Around the same time in the latter half of the 2010s, the popularity of the HBO show Game of Thrones (hereafter, GOT), based on George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy novels, was at its peak, including in China, where it found an audience eager to download it across the Great Firewall and interpret it as a political allegory for Xi Jinping’s first term in power.⁷ Chinese and western media were each using GOT as a kind of comparative template for inventive Chinese television series such as Nirvana in Fire⁸ 瑯琊榜⁹ (BTV, 2015) and Story of Yanxi Palace¹⁰ 延禧攻略¹¹ (iQIYI, 2018), which have little to do with GOT’s narrative fantasy of medieval, quasi-European kingdoms, much less replicate its brand of gruesome violence or exploitative sex.

Like the presumed similarities between The Three-Body Problem and Star Wars (seemingly based on nothing more substantial than that each is a sci-fi narrative originally packaged as a trilogy), it is easy to write off such facile comparisons as simple clickbait or marketing schemes. Beneath the ad copy glibness, though, we should consider how such correspondences also gesture toward changing understandings of the spectacular representation of historical and technological fantasy in China’s popular culture. The media industry’s adoption of strategies for global, digital distribution is reconfiguring Chinese narratives on screen for our spectacular age. So it made perfect sense when, in September 2020, Netflix announced a huge deal for the rights to produce The Three-Body Problem by the creative team behind GOT, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss (who walked away from a contract with Lucasfilm to develop further Star Wars films to pursue this adaptation), along with producer Alexander Woo.¹² Excited speculation and weary skepticism on how the producers would adapt Liu’s novel began immediately.¹³ On the one hand, Benioff and Weiss had already proved their skills at translating epic source material on a blockbuster scale, but on the other, the final season of GOT, especially, revealed a tendency to over rely on set-piece spectacular at the expense of narrative coherence. What seemed certain was that the Netflix adaptation, which premiered in March under the stylized name of 3 Body Problem, would necessarily indulge in the contemporary global vernacular of visual spectacle.

Spectacularity is at the heart of the wildly inventive novel series, as well as one of the keys to its production and circulation as a cultural narrative and object. My focus on spectacle in the Netflix adaptation highlights not just the epic scale of the story and its massive CGI budget (at $160 million, the first season is one of the most expensive scripted series in Netflix history),¹⁴ but also its relation to the show’s global audience through translation and adaptation, the fan communities and media speculation that it has spawned, and the overdetermined space it occupies as the biggest popular culture phenomenon to come out of China in decades. The scale of the narrative’s diegetic spectacle, in other words, is reproduced in its discursive circulation and proliferation.

The series sets the terms of its narrative spectacle in its opening scene, which depicts a Cultural Revolution-era struggle session. One of the protagonists, Ye Wenjie 叶文洁 (a character who, unlike most of the others, largely remains unchanged from the novel), witnesses a group of Red Guards brutally murder her father, a renowned physics professor who maintains an unrepentant belief in scientific reason until his dying breath. The stage upon which his execution takes place faces a crowd of thousands, whipped into political fervor and hungry bloodlust. The spectacle of mass violence not only recalls the kind of gruesome barbarity that GOT is famous for, but also signals a spectacular dynamic between the perspective of a lone spectator, Wenjie, fighting against a tide of overwhelming, apocalyptic forces that structures the show as a whole. Following this traumatic experience, Wenjie is sent to a labor camp in Inner Mongolia and loses all faith in humankind through her own persecution there. Her nihilistic view on a future for humanity leads her to initiate contact with the alien civilization called the San-Ti (termed “Trisolarans” in Ken Liu’s translation), who are intent on conquering Earth in order to survive the destruction of their own planet.

Liu Cixin famously placed the struggle session scene in Chapter 7 of his original novel in order not to attract attention of the censors (it was, with Liu’s blessing, moved to the beginning of the novel in the English translation).¹⁵ The uncompromising intensity of the revolutionary spectacle serves as an impetus for the similarly zero-sum, world-shaking drama that follows. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo pay particular cinematic attention to the sublime convergence of technology, power, and collectivity wielded by the San-Ti through their sophons, such as the blinking of the stars that introduces their visual might to the rest of the world in episode one, or the globe-spanning montage of every electronic screen simultaneously displaying the ominous, collectivized message “YOU ARE BUGS” in episode five.

The effect the visual spectacle has on the adaptation is at once its best feature and its limiting factor. 3 Body Problem looks awesome (the 30 million-soldier “human abacus” in episode three is as breathtakingly sublime as the nanofiber shredding of a tanker filled with San-Ti sympathizers in episode five is insanely violent). But the attention paid to visual spectacle also produces the consequential effect of leading the story away from its Chinese origins. Many viewers, especially fans of the original novel, have been vociferous in their criticism of the Netflix series, justifiably wondering which “Chinese” elements are left in the adaptation. Liu’s mostly China-based and unconnected characters, for example, are relocated from China to London and ethnically diversified, and some have been created out of whole cloth in order to create relationships (the so-called “Oxford Five” group of beautiful and brilliant friends) that never existed in the novels. While this alteration may be justified for the televisual format, it also signals something about the limits of the show’s spectacular horizon. The only storyline in the adaptation that is set in China are flashbacks to Ye Wenjie’s growing disassociation from humankind during the Cultural Revolution. This narrative thread gestures to the story’s Chinese origins, but also marks the show’s departure from them. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo’s internationalization of the series’ plot line in the Netflix adaptation may be seen as a culmination of the novel’s global popularity, but making the Cultural Revolution flashbacks the sole representation of China has another effect of containing China in its own history. While the Oxford Five gear up to counter the San-Ti in London, the image of China imprinted on the viewers is not just from another era, but one culpable for the impending alien invasion. The traumatic spectacle of the mass politics in China’s past produces a menacing specter in the global future.

What’s more, Ye Wenjie’s origin story complicates the show’s own circulation by showcasing the darkest period of modern Chinese history, ensuring that the show will face criticism from audiences in China, where many commenters took issue with the scene as an example of the West’s attempt to humiliate China¹⁶ (Netflix is officially prohibited in China). Chinese media conglomerate Tencent released its own adaptation of Liu’s novel a year before the Netflix premiere.¹⁷ The 30-episode series faithfully – at times literally — translates the story (with the exception, of course, of the crucial struggle session scene, which is omitted) and won high ratings in China, but still left some viewers wishing for a bigger special effects budget.¹⁸ While some Chinese critics of the Netflix series, including state media,¹⁹ seek to protect what they see as an essentially Chinese narrative from becoming diluted through politically-correct diversification, the adaptation’s creators (and Liu himself, it should be noted) have explained these decisions through their particular narrative focus on the global scope of the story.²⁰ The “universal” scale of Liu’s The Three-Body Problem does push us to consider a shared sense of the global and the future of humanity. But the Netflix showrunners’ decision to visually and narratively prioritize epic spectacle ends up distorting the Chinese features of the story in a way that both foregrounds the Chinese manifestation of the spectacular dynamic that anticipates the invasion of the San-Ti, but also erases much of the characters, settings, and nuances of language that mark the story as a product of Chinese culture. As compelling and entertaining as it may be, Netflix’s show does nothing to challenge China’s secondary position in the superficial comparisons that plague so many Chinese cultural productions in the global market. Benioff, Weiss, and Woo seem more interested in perpetuating the idea of a “Chinese Star Wars” or “Chinese Game of Thrones” rather than disrupting the comparative order of things, or even producing a “Chinese Three-Body Problem.”