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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely loved the whole series. I have never been as disappointed at a screen adaptation as I was at the netflix show. I couldn't get past episode 2. Terrible.

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You haven't watched many Netflix adaptations! If the sensation of being banished from 10-dimensional cosmological heavens down into dead 3-dimensional purgatories could be meaningfully be experienced by humans, that ineffable tragedy, it would be the sensation of being forced to watch the Netflix flattening of a book you once dearly enjoyed.

"If the sensation of being banished from 10-dimensional cosmological heavens down into dead 3-dimensional purgatories..."

Ahem, spoilers. :-)

You made me laugh. I understand this reference as of about 14 hours ago.

One could argue that your TV screen is 2-dimensional.

Fully enjoyed both the books and Netflix adaptation. In fact I am surprised how well they made an entertaining tv series of this material that will appeal to a wide audience. My only criticism would be how fast they went through the story.

Same here, I've watched to episode 4 (the scene with the boat is in episode 5 and I just didn't want to watch that on a screen).

I can understand the desire to humanize the characters for the show, but the characters feel like a CW teen drama. I don't mind that they added some drama, but the drama they added was bad.

Maybe expectations were too high? I thought it followed book 1 pretty closely.

As book-movie translation go. I thought the choices they made in 3-Body were better than the tradeoffs in Dune 2.

But I liked Dune 2 as a movie, but leaving out the Spacing Guild, and how the Water of Life can poison Sand Worms, and they change to the Atomics. It changed entire dynamic on the stand off with Emperor. And leaving out Alia.

The only problem with 3-Body, is for season 1, they did stuff too much into it from Book 2, not that it was bad to do it, but maybe needed 1-2 more episodes, instead if felt rushed.

Huh, what were your complaints? I thought they did a pretty decent job - although I finished Death’s End in 2019 so it’s been a while. They preserved the most important parts in my mind, and otherwise the compromises seemed acceptable. I had low expectations and was pleasantly surprised.

The splitting of the main character (who was a humble middle aged Chinese scientist) into 4 pointlessly racially diverse beautiful young people who somehow represent the apex of the scientific community (and a snack company for some reason).

The total butchering of interesting concepts, for example the usage of the sun as an amplifier which, while based on some hand-wavey fictional science, was quite fleshed out in the book, turned into an utterly ridiculous scene where characters literally wrote out an equation on a blackboard that amounted to "a + b = c" (I'm not exaggerating) and you could practically see the mathematical symbols floating around their heads like that Zach Galifianakis meme.

But most of all it is the shit dialog. I don't remember the books trying to force sciency sounding words into every fucking line of dialogue. This show is determined to make very stupid people think "wow this is smart".

It's interesting that your primary criticism is that the scientists are too diverse...truly a struggle for me to see why that's such an abhorrent error

Personally I thought they did a good job at adapting a book that I thought would be nearly impossible to transform into a "pop" sci fi series.

That's not my primary criticism. I literally prefaced my primary criticism with "But most of all".

It's an "abhorrent error" because the themes of the books were deeply tied to the Chinese heritage and culture of the author and his characters.

I personally thought it was blindingly obvious that the show would be bad, to the point I haven't bothered watching. Not only are the books kinda hard to translate to TV, but the people in charge are the guys who did Game of Thrones. The train wreck that show turned into gave me no confidence that they could do a good job with an even more difficult adaptation.

I recommend watching the Tencent-produced Chinese adaptation, free on YouTube. It hewed very closely to the novel.

Watch the Tencent adaptation - like 30 episodes on just the first book (with subtitles). Really well done and faithful to the first novel.

Yes!

I was so excited for the show I went back and binge read all 3 books over the month of March. I really enjoyed them!

…I feel like the show is so convoluted and confusing (by design, I understand they’re trying to have this sense of mystery) that someone who hasn’t read the books would be totally lost.

I’m still watching, but I had higher hopes for it.

Try the 30-episode Chinese version: it's superb.

My friend and I had a hard time staying awake through the first episode. It was just incredibly slow.

Each to their own.

I don't think that the fact that you struggled to make it through the first episode says anything about the show though.

I suppose our votes cancel each other out.

I read the books and enjoyed them but there's a few dead-ends and the plot is a bit meandering.

I thought the TV series was great.

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