Alien-Ate the Future

 “3 Body Problem”- 1^st Season Netflix Series created by Benioff, Weiss & Woo, 2024 (There be spoilers)

This is an adaptation of a science fiction trilogy by Chinese author Liu Cixin called Remembrance of Earth's Past, citing Proust. A 'three body' problem is the supposed impossibility of determining the movement and gravitation of 3 masses - in this case 3 suns around a single planet. The result is unpredictable weather and chaotic stability, making that planet uninhabitable. So the denizens of that planet have to move. Where do they go?

Clarence 'Da' Shi - the sane Intel Operative

Patch that premise together with 1966 scenes from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, as Red Guards denounce the Big Bang theory that implies the origin of the universe is God's work. A dissenting professor supporting the theory is beaten to death and his educated daughter sent off to work in a huge logging operation. Above the project on a low mountain is a massive radio telescope sending signals into outer space. The daughter eventually gets off the logging crew and becomes part of the 'Red Coast' telescope staff sending signals. She contacts a civilization in a distant galaxy even though she is warned by one of the aliens – a self-identified pacifist - not to do it. She does it because she thinks the world is a failure and needs help. This is her solution.

Then it's 2024 in Oxford and London, England, not China. What follows is a typical alien invasion story concerning a group of multi-culty scientific friends and a number of dying cosmologists, physicists and scientists. The original book characters were Chinese so this has been colored for the 'western' market. Add a naive and sinister group of humans who organize to help the San-ti aliens who will arrive on earth in 400 years! The group uses a slick VR gaming headset to choose who they will recruit. They have an ocean ship called 'Judgment Day' and talk to the San-ti on a shipboard radio transmitter. The boss man calls the monotonic female San-ti voice “Lord.” Cult killers claim 'the Lord has a better way.' This might remind you of dozens of cults like Jehovah's Witnesses, Heaven's Gate or Scientology awaiting another kind of rapture. It might also remind you of libertarian tech billionaires on ocean-based 'free' islands escaping society, as the Judgment Day cult is founded by an energy billionaire. Some have called him an 'environmentalist' but that's a ridiculous stretch.

After a number of murders by the cult, the effort is on to defeat the future San-ti invasion and their allies. The San-ti decide humans are really 'bugs' and can't be trusted, which includes nearly all their earth allies. These technologically advanced beings seem to endorse bloodshed and extermination – so their social structure is not much beyond modern capitalism, though their technology is light-years ahead. This is typical of bourgeois science fiction which cannot imagine anything beyond the present social structure except dystopia. On their planet the San-ti's civilizations have been destroyed time and time again by the 3 suns, yet somehow they have had time to develop incredible tech. It's not really materially feasible but you are to suspend disbelief. There will be no communist utopias or sophisticated societies interacting with us, just killers. At least that is the expectation here, as I have not read the books or know what future seasons hold.

What to make of this series? Is it relevant to anything or just a diverting entertainment brought to you by the show-runners and some of the actors from Game of Thrones? There are hints of environmental destruction – Silent Spring and clear-cutting of trees play a role. The San-ti might be repurposed space doppelgangers for the fear of immigrants coming to the U.K. All the micro-particle hadron supercolliders around the world, including the big one at CERN, have shut down because their results are incomprehensible and useless. Is this a nod to the present failure of the real colliders to solve cosmological and physics problems? Riots break out after the San-ti threaten humanity. This reflects how irrational and doomed humans can be – as riots solve nothing. Bloodshed is not spared in the war on the Judgment Day ship traversing the Panama Canal, so the humans will meet fire with fire. In fact that ship mimics current libertarian Seasteaders buying up ocean liners.  None of this connects to any overarching theme except perhaps more fuck-up-ed-ness and war.

1966 Cultural Revolution 'Struggle' Session

The opening scene depicting a 'struggle session' in the Cultural Revolution will insult the present leadership of the CCP. They disowned the Cultural Revolution long ago, as their conservative political tendency was denounced as 'capitalist roaders' by the Red Guards, but they still want to keep it under wraps. The scene is a hard depiction of how crude and violent it sometimes was. It was an ultra-left version of an anti-bureaucratic struggle and became part of a faction fight that Mao ultimately torpedoed when vast peasant and working-class communes arose independent of the Party. The student Red Guards in the scene are actually correct in seeing the Big Bang theory as a religious origin story but their handling of the professors is idiotic and cruel.

3 Body Problem is a pastiche – an entertainment diversion with nods to reality to give it grounding. The standard reviews from the NYT, NPR, The Guardian and the Hollywood Reporter are similarly empty. At this point the first season is a fascinating but thin shell, the spectacle of a false future. Angry aliens from another planet are not a real problem or opportunity, not even as a metaphor. Even Game of Thrones had more relevance to the human present and that was set in some imaginary past.

Prior blog reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Red Planets – Marxism and Science Fiction,” "Game of Thrones," “Squid Game,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “People's Future of the United States,” “The Heart Goes Last” and “Handmaid's Tale” (both by Atwood); “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “Good News” (Abbey); “Hunger Games,” “Matrix,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (Dick); “Planet of the Apes” (3 movies); “The Road” (McCarthy); “The Dispossessed” and “Left Hand of Darkness” (Le Guin); “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “The Ministry for the Future” (K.S. Robinson); “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “World War Z,” “American War, “R.U.R. And the Insect Play” (Capek), “Mad Max – Fury Road,” “Dune – the Movie,” “Maoism and the Chinese Revolution,” “China's New Red Guards,” “Hard Like Water” (Lianke).   

Tot Kultur Kommissar / April 4, 2024