3 Body Problem: The Joke Was Great, and the Last Few Episodes Were Even Better

I haven't read the novel by Liu Cixin and its sequels, and I didn't read much about the series because I wanted to be surprised.  I'd say the first season of 3 Body Problem was superb -- a powerful mix of thought-provoking, stunning action, and heartbreaking human stories, all in support of a story of a life-threatening interstellar intelligent species, the San-Ti, who have been in contact with our planet for more than 50 years and now are approaching us, some 400 years away from arriving, which may mean the end of our species.  And there was a wise and funny joke about Einstein and God which I hadn't heard before.

But almost all of that happened in the last few episodes, and the beginning and middle of the eight-episode first season was bogged down with a computer game the interstellar beings are doling out to various people on Earth for various reasons.   I've always enjoyed science fiction about computer games interacting with reality, beginning with Orson Scott Card's path-breaking and brainy Ender's Game, but its situation in 3 Body Problem was needlessly repetitive.  The heart of 3 Body was closer to Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End and Damon Knight's "To Serve Man" (see this collection of Knight's stories), and the first season of the 3 Body television series, whatever may have been done in the novel, should have spent more time on that.  (This slow start is reminiscent of another iconic novel in science fiction, Frank Herbert's Dune, that also took a long time to get going, but once it did was fabulous, and led to not just a trilogy but a whole series, exceeded in excellence only by Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, in my opinion.)

But speaking of hearts and brains, biology was actually far more the star of the first season than was space travel.  This puts 3 Body Problem in a league with Andrew Niccol's debut motion picture Gattaca.  If I'm making 3 Body sound derivative, that's because it is, but that's ok, because the first season puts all of these perennial elements of science fiction together in an original, compelling way.  It's not every day you see a science fiction series starting in Mao's China and its emphasis on ideology over truth (a problem unfortunately arising now in the United States and other parts of the world, off the fiction screen and for real), moving into a life-and-death James Bondian present fighting for the survival in the future of our very species.  

Ironically, the unflattering depiction of intellectual life in Mao's China at the beginning of the 3 Body Problem television series contradicts the warning that five Republican US Senators sent to Netflix in 2020 that the TV series would just be spreading Chinese propaganda. Of course, those Senators and no one other than the creators of the TV series had any idea what would actually be depicted in the TV series, and thus those Senators based their concerns on the novel. The original Chinese publication of the novel indeed did not begin with the jolting scene of a physicist brutally killed in the throes of the cultural revolution -- because he believes in truth over ideology -- but that scene did appear in the middle of the original Chinese novel, and at the beginning of the English translation (Liu Cixin confirms that he wrote the novel with that scene at the beginning). Apparently those US Senators didn't take the time to read the novel before offering their ill-founded concerns about the TV series.

In any case, I don't recall seeing anything quite like this TV series at all, and I'm eagerly awaiting the second season and more.  The dialog, by the way, was excellent, as was the acting.  Nearly everyone was new to me, other than Game of Thrones' Liam Cunningham, and it was good to see him on the screen again. Kudos to David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo for creating the series, and kudos to me for not having to warn you about spoilers in this review, because they really aren't any, are there?

Anon: Minor Work from a Great Writer and Director

Andrew Niccol's Gattaca in 1997 remains one of the surprise all-time best science fiction movies, surprise because Gattaca was Niccol's first.  His follow-up, The Truman Show in 1998, was even more lionized by some, but I didn't like nearly as much as Gattaca, which was stunning in its mix Brave New World totalitarian life and the yearning for space travel.  I've seen some of Niccol's subsequent movies, but I honestly can't recall them.

Anon had all the right ingredients for another great movie - Clive Owen and Amanda Seyfried in the cast, and a kind of Philip K. Dick Minority Report story, with a police force that can scan people's minds and therein nab criminals (not before but after the act), and hackers who can cut up and out those images.  Add to that a serial-killer hacker suspect (Seyfried) hunted by Owen (a detective who can mind scan), and they're sexually attracted to one another, and you could've had another great Niccol movie.

There were lots of good scenes, savvy dialogue, wonderful locales (my favorite: Sal's apartment on Wadsworth Terrace in Manhattan), and a pretty good twist at the end (which I won't tell you), but Anon nonetheless lacked, I don't know, a certain depth and profundity, even though that's exactly what it was trying to convey.   Anyone, especially police detectives, having access via your brain to what you see and do is a pretty traumatic and revolutionary development in human life, and for all the characters' remonstrating about that in the movie - or, in some cases, celebrating it - the ambience fell short of kicking you in the cosmic gut.   Probably there was a little too much emphasis on the murders and the police work.  Perhaps seeing scanning in other contexts a little more would have given Anon a more universal grounding.

As it was, Anon is a good film, worth watching, but a minor work from a great director and writer.  Hey, it's good enough that I'll definitely watch Niccol's next movie.

 

Anon: A Good

Just saw Anon on Netflix, where it debuted just two days ago.  The movie's by Andrew Niccol, and I'd say it's better than The Truman Show but not as good as Gattica, for whatever that's worth to you.

The story's pure cyberpunk, or a mix of cyberpunk and police detective, though police are usually right in the middle of and never too far away from any cyberpunk story.  You could also say that Anon is part of the cyberpunk renaissance, along with the Blade Runner sequel and Altered Carbon, but that wouldn't be quite true, either, since cyberpunk never really went away.

What is true about Anon is that it's a well told and well played story, in near future New York (with scenes in places where I've actually spent time), about a homicide detective (Sal, well played by Clive Owen, who plays everything well) who is hunting an apparent serial killer (a nameless "girl," with one of Amanda Seyfried's best performances) who is hard to find, because she's created an algorithm that erases all of the digital records that police have of everyone, everything they do, and everything they see.   In that sense - police employing some kind advanced almost mental-telepathic system to eradicate crime, or at least keep it bay, Anon has a kinship with Minority Report, and indeed is as Dickian as it gets without actually being based on a Philip K. Dick story.

The plot is pretty tight, with some real surprises and twists.   There is one place in which the "girl" should have recognized Sal after he goes undercover to find her - given that he was just chasing her, in an excellent scene in which she eludes him by making him fall down a flight of stairs by distorting what they actually look like to him.  But, hey, that little glitch is ok with me, given that the stairs scene was so cool, as is the master hacker's power not only to erase records and thereby traces of herself, but also project false visions into any head she chooses to use as a screen.  It's a good thing Google pulled back from Google Glass a few years back, because seeing Anon would have done that product no good at all.

Though, I'd probably still go for Google Glass right now, and take my chances with Amanda Seyfried's character, since ... well, to tell you more would give away too much of the story.  Or maybe I can't relate that part of the story because the hacker removed it from my records ... though, in the narrative, biologically (naturally developed) memories are not affected by the hacking, so ...

Well, see the movie and see what you think.