3 Body Problem (Netflix)

Netflix’s big gamble, “3 Body Problem” – created by “Game of Thrones” masterminds David Benioff and D.B.Weiss with Alexander Woo – opened Lille’s Series Mania on Friday, immediately dividing the viewers on a series well reviewed by Variety.

“It’s a very ambitious show and it has a great scale, but I wonder when all the hooks they got into me will reward me with knowledge. I see a lot of potential, but I don’t see a clear path,” actor Malick Bauer told Variety after the screening. One of this year’s International Competition jurors, he is known for the first German Disney+ series “Sam – A Saxon.”

“It can be a great thing, but I do worry if the audience will be given their time. It’s one of the biggest problems in today’s shows: You need to capture people right away, otherwise they will find something else. Is it too slow? For a media consumer in 2024, yes. For an artist, no. It’s a bit like watching ‘Lost’ all over again. I am willing to wait, but I am not sure if the market will follow.”

Director Bertrand Desrochers, behind miniseries “Les Oubliettes,” added: “It reminded me of ‘Dune,’ where the first movie served as a trailer for the second one. ‘Oh look, Zendaya! If you give me money for another one, I will show you more of her.’ It’s all about building this suspense.”

With several industry players opting to go off the record, calling the first two episodes “slow,” “overcomplicated” and “cold,” and quite a few walkouts after the pilot, “3 Body Problem” might not be able to follow into “GoT’s” crowd-pleasing footsteps. It might, however, earn cult status.

“I am very surprised this is their next step after ‘GoT,’ but it’s great that they are taking a chance. They could have done whatever they wanted, especially something similar. Instead, they said: ‘We are going to grab that cult book, which is considered to be unfilmable,’” laughs journalist François Busnel, praising the show’s cliffhangers.

Adapted from the Chinese science-fiction saga by Cixin Liu, “3 Body Problem” dives into humankind’s first contact with an alien civilization. “This is a story of what happens when laws of the universe start to break and what it means for all humanity, but particularly for a tight-knit group of friends and colleagues solving the mystery before time runs out,” explained Woo in a short video introduction.

“This show is really all about literature. It’s choral: You have so many characters and they are well-written, but it’s also slow and very intellectual. Personally, I love the fact that we have all this time. It’s a little too much, it’s true, but it doesn’t matter,” adds Busnel.

“Can I tell you something? I haven’t seen ‘GoT’. I feel like an alien right now,” says Camélia Jordana, singer and star of Disney + series “Irrésistible,” also set to deliver a masterclass at the fest.

“I left the screening wanting to know more. About everyone! How did it start, what’s the idea?! The way it’s structured, there are really two options: Either you don’t get it at all and move on, or you try to follow these different timelines. I am actually surprised I want to find out more, because there was so much I didn’t understand. Usually, if that’s the case, I am done. Now, I need to know what’s going on!”

Influencer Louise Aubery, known as MyBetterSelf, echoes the sentiment.

“I do have a lot of questions, but I am eager to finally connect these dots. This show is a constant enigma,” she notes.

“It’s sci-fi, but I feel like they have mastered the art of making it realistic and that’s always the difficult part. I was hooked. Sometimes, we watch shows just to chill and have a good time, but this one will create some debates. We are definitely missing some information, but I liked that it was touching upon the subject of mental health. It’s great it’s becoming a recurring topic these days.”

With some SeriesMania guests comparing the show to the ambiguous and often emotionally distant works of Christopher Nolan – “You don’t get it and you get a feeling they don’t really care if you do” – others revelled in its lack of answers.

“I don’t like it when things are too simple. It’s boring,” says novelist Delphine de Vigan, behind “Based on a True Story” adapted by Roman Polański.

“I don’t like ‘easy,’ so I enjoyed these two episodes. I had to work for it and try to catch all the connections between the characters. I have two kids and they are the same: Simple is not what they are looking for these days either.”

Before the screening, stars John Bradley and Jess Hong presented the show.

“Luckily for me, when I first read the scripts, I hadn’t yet read the books and their writing speaks for itself. It’s enthralling and it captures you. They are incredible when it comes to writing characters and relationships. I was crying, laughing and gasping. I was so captivated,” admitted Hong.

“We had a physicist consultant and he introduced us to his students. We went to Oxford University to talk to these two students, 18 or 19 years old and smarter than I’ll be in 100 years, but what struck me was that they are just… people. They go to a bar to have a drink after a long day, they have relationships, friendships and fights. That’s what I held onto.”

Eiza González, Benedict Wong, Rosalind Chao, Jovan Adepo and Jonathan Pryce are also in the cast, alongside Benioff and Weiss’ regular Bradley – praised by Series Mania general director Laurence Herszberg for the fact that unlike so many others, his character in “GoT” “never died.”

“The great thing about their writing in ‘GoT’ and ‘3 Body Problem’ is that it takes these huge swings and creates these huge worlds, but they are very careful to put real characters in them. They know that if you don’t care about these people, you won’t care about the stakes,” he observed. His character, Jack Rooney, wasn’t in the novels.

“This show is based on books, which is a blessing and a curse, because there is a group of people that can be disappointed if we don’t get the adaptation right. But because he isn’t in the books, it’s not my fault,” he joked.

“‘GoT’ was huge when it came to the scope, but this is probably even bigger. Part of our show takes place in China in the 1960s, part takes place in the here and now, part takes place in the VR video game. We started shooting nearly three years ago, so it has been a long road, but we are very confident and we hope people will like it. It feels like it will be something you have never seen before.”

“3 Body Problem” premieres on Netflix on March 21.

The “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were finishing off their hit HBO series after an eight-season run and wondering what was next. That was when the Netflix executive Peter Friedlander approached them with a trilogy of science-fiction books by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin called “Remembrance of Earth’s Past.”

“We knew that it won the Hugo Award, which is a big deal for us since we grew up as nerds,” Benioff said of the literary prize for science fiction. Barack Obama was also on record as a fan.

Benioff and Weiss dipped in and were intrigued by what they found: a sweeping space invasion saga that begins in 1960s China, amid the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, and involves a superior alien race that has built a rabid cultlike following on Earth. A heady mix of science and skulduggery, featuring investigations both scientific and criminal, it felt utterly unique. “So much content right now feels like, ‘Oh, here’s another forensic show, here’s another legal thriller,’ it just feels like it’s a version of something you’ve seen,” Benioff said. “This universe is a different one.”

Or, as Weiss added, “This is the universe.”

Those novels are now the core of “3 Body Problem,” a new series that Benioff and Weiss created with Alexander Woo (“True Blood”). It premiered on opening night at the South by Southwest Film Festival and arrives Thursday on Netflix. The setting has changed along the way, with most of the action unfolding in London rather than China (although the Cultural Revolution is still a key element), and the characters, most of them young and pretty, now represent several countries. But the central themes remain the same: belief, fear, discovery and an Earth imperiled by superior beings. Among the heroes are the gruff intelligence chief Thomas Wade, played by the “Thrones” veteran Liam Cunningham, and a team of five young, reluctant, Oxford-trained physicists played by John Bradley — another “Thrones” star — Jovan Adepo, Eiza Gonzáles, Jess Hong and Alex Sharp. Can they save the world for their descendants?

In an interview in Austin the day of the SXSW premiere, the series creators discussed life after “Thrones,” their personal ties to “3 Body Problem” and the trick to making physics sexy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

The series is quite different from the books, particularly the settings and characters, both of which are a lot less Chinese. How did this come about?

D.B. WEISS Once the long process of acquiring the rights to the books was finished, we ended up with the rights for an English-language adaptation. So if we had kept all the characters Chinese in China, then we would’ve had a whole show set in China in English. We also thought it was really important to the nature of the story that the group of people working together to solve this problem look like the world. Obviously, there’s going to be an American involved. There’s a Chinese person who was born in China, but also the Chinese diaspora. There are people from Southwest Asia. There are people from Latin South America. It just made fundamental sense to us to broaden the scope of it, because if this happened to the world, it feels like that’s what would happen in the process of dealing with it.

“Game of Thrones” was a cultural behemoth. How did that experience inform how you approached this show?

WEISS I thought we were making a show for a lot of Dungeons and Dragons players. Of which I am one.

DAVID BENIOFF And it wasn’t a behemoth out of the gate. In case anyone from Netflix is listening: It took years for that show to become big, and they had faith in it and stuck with it. But one of the things I think we learned on “Thrones” was to hire really good people who know what they’re doing, and then make sure they understand what you’re looking for.

We’ve been talking a lot about Ramin Djawadi, our composer from “Thrones,” who’s also the composer on this show and hopefully the composer on everything we ever do. Nine times out of 10, when he delivers a cue to us, we’re like, “That’s great, Ramin.” And then the 10th time — sometimes we don’t even know exactly what’s wrong with it, it’s like, “I don’t know.” And he’ll think about it for a second and say, “Let me just take another shot at it. I get it.” And that’s rare, I think, to find someone who’s such a high-level artist who’s also that open and doesn’t get easily offended. We have a number of people like that we worked with on “Thrones” that we brought with us to this show.

How about having such a fervent fan base that wasn’t shy about what they wanted, especially down the stretch of the series?

BENIOFF It was interesting. We live in interesting times.

WEISS You want people to watch what you make, but you don’t get to control people’s reactions to what you make.

BENIOFF Not yet.

WEISS We’re working on a device. I’m sure somebody’s working on it, anyway. But until they make the device, you make the story that you want to make, if you’re lucky enough to have the backing necessary to do that, then let what happens happen.

You don’t see a lot of series that look at Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The opening struggle session sequence is terrifying.

ALEXANDER WOO It’s a part of history that is not written about in fiction very much, let alone filmed. And my family lived through it, as did the family of Derek Tsang, who directed the first two episodes. We give a lot of credit to him for bringing that to life, because he knew that it had not been filmed with this clinical eye maybe ever. He took enormous pains to have every detail of it depicted as real as it could be. I showed it to my mother, and you could see a chill coming over her, and she said, “That’s real. This is what really happened.” And she added, “Why would you show something like that? Why do you make people experience something so terrible?” But that’s how we knew we’d done our job.