It’s like someone asked ChatGPT to turn the book into a dumb anglo sitcom.
-Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the ‘friends’ act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They’re constantly insulting or hitting each other. It’s just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.
-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.
-Single characters from the book have been unnecessarily split into multiple new characters adding nothing to the story.
-The story is a cosmic horror but comedy and romance have been forced in for no reason whatsoever except as filler, which is even more mind-boggling because they’ve essentially rushed all of the good stuff in the book to make room for unfunny jokes.
-Apparently they could barely afford any sets and extras, so scenes and locations that are supposed to be bristling with sights and people just feel oddly empty. Even the special effects feel muted. The budget is just weirdly limited, and the show looks much cheaper than the Tencent series.
-Almost all of the science (which is the interesting stuff) has been gutted from this science fiction.
I hate anglo slop. Where is the kino. Tencent pls adapt The Dark Forest.
Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the ‘friends’ act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They’re constantly insulting or hitting each other. It’s just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.
-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.
Does every netflix adaptation get written by the same exact people?
I don’t know if they all go to the same writing school but my hypothesis is that this is how writing schools are teaching everyone to write stories these days. It’s everywhere.
My money is on it being focus group/analysis/exec driven. Makes more sense as a common denominator.
Does every netflix adaptation get written by the same exact people
Yes, the data from Netflix’s user base and algorithm basically writes the episodes. That’s how Netflix’s version of House Of Cards with Kevin Spacey was made. They just jammed all the most popular stuff, according to Netflix user data, into one show, and that’s how House Of Cards was mad. That’s why all these similarities in Netflix shows exist. With AI it’s just going to get worse. We’re officially in the era of algorithically driven shows.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
None of the ‘friends’ act like friends.
nobody remembers what friends were like
It’s bad folks
The Chinese tv show has 30 episodes. Meanwhile 5 episodes into the Netflix series and the story is already farther along than the entire Chinese first season . This is not an exaggeration.
Yeah. The books jump around in time a lot between the present and future, so they’re doing all the whole series more chronologically with the book 2/3 protagonists’ stories happening concurrently with the first book story.
But also yeah it’s moving along very very quickly.
I could watch it, but the pacing really is a problem. The show rushes out answers to questions that it would have been fun to have some time to think about. Also, really egregious use of CGI for things they really shouldn’t have to use it for. The not being able to afford extras thing seems very apparent there as well. In an army of 30 million of course you’re going to have to use CGI, but standard practice would be to have the first rank of soldiers - the ones really close to the camera - be played by real people. No such luck here I’m afraid.
The show rushes out answers to questions that it would have been fun to have some time to think about.
The new Percy Jackson series did this too. There is lots to praise about the new adaptation, but the plot feels rushed, propelled forth by characters having sudden realisations multiple times per episode.
The rehydration scene is supposed to feature millions of Trisolarans. There’s like 10 on screen.
I’ve looked up what the ending of the books is and it sounds like the main conflict is resolved via deus ex machina and then everyone dies anyway so nothing that happened mattered at all
Yup. And the only reason any of the plot can even happen is totally bogus space magic that’s so silly you can’t even call it soft sci-fi. I gave up after the first book, and I really have nothing good to say about it. I’ve heard people opine that it was a lot of people’s first science fiction book the same way Harry Potter was a lot of kids first fantasy adventure book, and that’s why it had such an impact.
Yeah I hear it’s about collapsing spatial dimensions as if reality itself is a perfect 1:1 copy of our simplified understanding of it (math) and it’s done with technology that’s super advanced so it never has to actually be described or follow conservation of energy or anything
Plus the entire premise seems to be a nihilistic parable about how fascism is right and you need to wipe out rival civilizations before they even know you exist, or they’ll do the same to you
Plus the entire premise seems to be a nihilistic parable about how fascism is right and you need to wipe out rival civilizations before they even know you exist, or they’ll do the same to you
I see this take all the time here, and then when I (a person who read the book) counter that it’s a Sci-Fi parable about Chinese foreign policy from the perspective of the Chinese (you need to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself or the evil Trisolarans American Empire will come get you, humanity is the China stand in in the novel) white people yell at me for being some kind of asian chauvinist.
I love how Hexbears just make up their minds about what they think of the works they never even bothered to read lol. Never change.
I guess, but the sciencyness being so silly didn’t work for me. Lovecraft style cosmic horror just straight up says “there are weird aliens who are totally bizarre and incomprehensible and they do psychic space magic for reasons your pathetic mammal brain will never understand and even a glancing encounter with them is so strange it will destroy your mind” and i can get behind that because it’s fun silly.
This is just “hey, what if your neighbors were total assholes?”
Once the sophons show up there’s no tension for the rest of the story bc it’s just like “oh, the trisolarans have magic and can do anything they want no matter how little sense it makes.” Like a big part of horror is gradually figuring out what the enemy is and realizing how totally fucked you are, but the sophons aren’t possible and don’t follow any physical rules so it’s just like “welp, guess we’re fucked then”.
I always compare it to revelation space, another story that explores the Dark Forest idea.
spoiler
The Wolves in Revelation Space are real fucking weird, but you get deep, deep in to the story before you really even get the edges of what they are and what they’re really capable of. The first book in the series is full of rapidly escalating "oh shit moments as the scale of how totally fucked everything is ratchets up again and again and again. The bad guys have a lot of space-magic that definitely does not agree with physics, but they’re also up against fairly hard limits - lightspeed travel takes a long time, ftl is impossible, even the super-high tech alien spookies still need to respect conservation of energy. When they finally pull out their trump card it’s the scale that is completely horrifying.
I mean to be fair the last book ends with the literal death of the universe
