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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
30
Mixed:
11
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Mar 21, 2024Radio TimesMar 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
3 Body Problem soars in every aspect. Visually? It's beautiful. Story-wise? Completely gripping? Cast-wise? Pitch perfect. Pacing? Flawless. It's an absolute masterclass from Benioff, Weiss and Woo in the type of sci-fi we need right now – bold, unflinching, creative, imaginative and completely unique.
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Mar 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
“3 Body Problem” belongs to an all too rare breed: mainstream entertainment that leads its viewers down bracingly original speculative corridors. .... Intellectual stimulants are balanced with the old-fashioned kind—namely, dramatic set pieces and alarmingly inventive forms of body horror. .... But the series also has genuine heart.
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Mar 11, 2024
LooperApr 1, 2024
Season 1 Review:
You would be forgiven for feeling that it's going to be more trouble than it's worth to attempt to become emotionally invested in it. But that feeling quickly wears off — in short order, it's off to the races. Part of this is down to the ramping up of the dramatic tension, as the mysterious science fiction elements of the story become more clear.
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Mar 21, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Ultimately, “3 Body Problem” works on a few levels. It’s a detective story, it’s a mystery box, it’s a grand visual spectacle, it’s a friendship drama, and, most of all, it’s an imagination-prodding piece of sci-fi. I’m not sure where it will go, if it is renewed, but the first season stands as a challenging and rewarding set of episodes. I’m on board for the next phase of this provocative intergalactic trip.
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Mar 21, 2024
iMar 21, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Don’t be put off by the fact it’s made by the Game of Thrones writers, or that it’s heavy (very heavy) on theoretical physics. If you give yourself over to the thrill ride of 3 Body Problem and embrace its high concept ideas, you’ll find yourself enraptured by one of the best sci-fi series Netflix has ever had.
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Mar 20, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Viewers new to the story should find it exciting on its own. (You do not need to have read the books first; you should never need to read the books to watch a TV series.) But the book trilogy does go to some weird, grim — and presumably challenging to film — places, and it will be interesting to see if and how future seasons follow. For now, there’s flair, ambition and galaxy-brain twists aplenty.
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SlashfilmMar 12, 2024
Season 1 Review:
If certain bits of characterization are painted with a broad brush or the final few episodes drag on beyond the season's obvious endpoint, it's a small price to pay for the sheer boldness and creativity on display. Luckily, none of this prevents these eight episodes from becoming one of the most interesting, well-written, and brilliantly adapted debut seasons in quite some time.
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RogerEbert.comMar 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
What works best about “3 Body Problem” is that you don’t really have to consider all of these deeper themes to enjoy it. It works on a superficial sci-fi level too with crazy character twists and solid performances throughout. Adepo, Sharp, Wong and Cunningham are particularly strong, and the craft is undeniable.
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Mar 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
One suspects that Liu’s world is so abstract that even the best adaptation possible will be difficult for some viewers to fully wrap their heads around, a hurdle that will only grow higher as the series continues. Nevertheless, “3 Body Problem” feels impressively close to that ideal — and not all of its accomplishments are due to structural choices or feats of filmmaking.
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ColliderMar 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
3 Body Problem actually benefits from being binge-watched. There is so much going on that a week-to-week release is likely to leave viewers scratching their heads if they aren't fully giving the show their complete attention. The multiple storylines that intersect with each other at different points in time also make the series incredibly rewatchable.
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Mar 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The only thing we need to care about is 3 Body Problem's entertainment value, which is readily apparent from the first few scenes. Logistical qualms aside, every episode leaves us with a compelling reason to watch the next — which is more than I can say for the lazily paced majority of Netflix originals.
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Mar 25, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The first five episodes are best, with their show-within-a-show structure, specifically those San-Ti virtual reality headsets that Mark Zuckerberg would give half his kingdom for. They're a portal into a whole other world, with its own set of narrative rules, and even the occasional flash of humor. Mostly they're just fun. “3 Body” noticeably sags when the San-Ti no longer deploy them (although one does reappear in a closing scene of this first season).
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Mar 22, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The most eagerly anticipated TV series event of the year is here, courtesy of the brains behind Game of Thrones and their mesmerizing mind games bring a Chinese literary classic about alien invasion to life in a way that makes you work hard to untangle its mysteries. Do it.
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Apr 16, 2024
Season 1 Review:
With too many characters involved, the story flattens most of them into archetypes: Jack is the comic relief. Will is the martyr. Saul is—well, he’s a blank slate. .... To be clear, there is much about the adaptation I enjoy. I get a kick out of realizing which portions of the trilogy the show’s creators have chopped up and rearranged, delighted to be shown parallels among characters I had not previously noticed, and still find Benioff and Weiss to be great at writing memorable, economical dialogue. The visuals are also cool, the aliens appropriately enigmatic, and the performances excellent.
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Mar 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Although the plot follows smoothly toward a coherent end, the performances, dialogue, and intensity of spectacle is a collection of elements that do not always come together neatly. The series aims at highbrow concepts about humanity, but its aesthetic and narrative approach is aimed squarely at comfortable approachability.
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Mar 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The season’s final episodes indicate that the show’s terrestrial scope will undoubtedly expand as the series continues (if it continues), spanning eons and galaxies just like the books. One wonders how they’ll achieve the crazy ideas Liu’s books introduce, even with the sky-high Netflix budget the show sports. But if they do, one hopes the showrunners will learn how to make those unfathomable ideas seem relatably human.
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The GuardianMar 21, 2024
Season 1 Review:
It looks great, it soon has Jonathan Pryce joining proceedings as Mike Evans, an eco activist turned reclusive oil tycoon billionaire, and the answers to the mystery of who (and what) the extraordinary forces are, what they want and who summoned them are doled out at a fair pace. But it can’t quite get rid of the cold abstraction that was at the heart of the books and which is revered by its fans.
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Mar 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The problem is that these new characters are never integrated with Liu’s story in a way that makes sense. Instead of making the globe-spanning plot empathetic on a human level, these friends’ various interpersonal entanglements just end up feeling irrelevant in the face of the show’s big ideas.
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Mar 11, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Benioff, Weiss, and Woo (a longtime writer on True Blood and the creator of Season Two of AMC’s horror anthology The Terror) have done everything they can to blend the big ideas from the books with people who have clear personalities and inner lives, rather than ones who exist entirely as plot functionaries. But even with these various smart deviations from the source material, the show’s first season is middling drama at best.
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Mar 21, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Where Liu’s books repeatedly deepen and complicate our understanding of the aliens’ motives—and even whether, if they do plan to annihilate humanity to make room for themselves, that would be such a bad thing—the series is unequivocal in its depiction of them as an invasive threat, which makes the analogy to real-life migrants incoherent at best. Good thing the show seems to forget about it as soon as it’s established.
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