[Weekly Update] Let's review Three-body

Been playing some Persona 4 lately. While the story and presentation is not as good as Persona 5, the characters are so much more interesting: The most gung ho girl in the party is also the one who is scared of lightning and ghost stories. The quiet girl is, however, the one who loves them. The punk with no patience is secretly an artist. The characters are complex and interesting. Whereas characters in P5 tends to fall into an anime archetype with little to no surprise to them.

Man, wouldn't it be cool if Ryuji turns out to be really good at cooking?

CHANNEL UPDATE

Our next video is finished and uploaded. I'll be working on the thumbnail and caption in a bit. It'll go live this Thursday! It's going to be about VFX vs SFX, a topic that I'm sure our viewers have a lot of thoughts on!

Next video will begin production right after. It'll be an analysis on the Crazy Rich Asians climatic Mahjong battle. I've already taken notes and made an outline. Now the hardest part is to find other relevant Mahjong movies to show you what Mahjong culture really is.

After that, we'll have a video on all the Ip Man movies that's not in the Ip Man main series. I've seen one of them, and it's... okay? Supposedly the Wing Chun in 2010 "prequel" featuring Dennis To is more accurate than the Donnie Yen performance.

It's extra confusing because it features Louis fan Sammo Hung, again, but in different roles. It's most definitely not an official prequel.

I still don't know if I want to focus more on the story failings or the action. If you watched any of the movies, let me know your thoughts.

MEDIA TALK

I finished watching the Three-body TV show!

Every I mention that show to my friend, I have to clarify that the title refers to a mathematical problem and not an adult site genre tag.

Since I don't review TV shows on the channel, it's review it here!

First thing first: There are currently two versions of the Three-body TV shows: An animated version, and a Tencent produced web series. There will also be a Netflix produced version in the near future. Here, I'll only talk about the Tencent version. (Because the animated version looks awful)

Anyway. Three-body is a sci-fi mystery series set around the late 2000s. One day, major experiments in the field of fundamental physics begin to go haywire, giving non-sense results. After realizing the result is not due to human or equipment error, a lot of scientists begin to think that physics as they know it isn't real. And many committed suicide, seemingly due to the collapse of their faith in science.

A nano-tech engineer and a renegade cop is then secretly tasked to investigate this strange event, which leads to some grand conspiracy.

Adapted from a hard sci-fi book series, Three-body brings up a lot of sci-fi concepts without explaining them. They aren't exactly obscure concepts, mind you: Cosmic microwave background, Galilean relativity, three-body problem, etc. But if you don't have a cursory understanding of fundamental physics, the series gets confusing very fast.

Granted, the director is really good at finding simple (albeit not always effective) visuals at explaining these concepts. For Galilean relativity, characters explain it by playing pool, and talk about why they can predict the movement of the pool balls regardless of time and location on Earth.

It's a lo-fi solution to a high tech concept. It not only saves the production a whole bunch of money on VFX (something that I dread from the Netflix adaptation), but the tactile nature of it feels appropriate for the era the story is set in.

Speaking of director... I have a sneaking suspicion that they changed director halfway through, which is common practice in TV, mind you. The opening episodes are slow and very artistically filmed. It's full of long static oners, with atmosphere taken over. As the series goes on, however, power zooms and digital zooms become more and more common. The plot goes by much faster, which is good. But the mood is nowhere near as strong as the opening episodes.

Which is a shame, too. A lot of the good stuffs are in the second half of the series, particularly the flashbacks set during the cultural revolution. A lot of people believe this book series is unadaptable in China due to this, especially not under the current conservative leaning administration.

Indeed, some concessions have to be made. Many of the darker stuffs are only hinted at and happened off screen. But ultimately, it sticks pretty close to the source material. People joke about how Tencent has no creativity and only knows how to copy. In this case, copying the source is all you need.

Ultimately, Three-body is a pretty good adaptation. It's a one of a kind hard sci-fi mystery that scratches a very particular itch, perfect for any sci-fi fans, or people who aren't usually into sci-fi but love astrophysics/fundamental physics. Would recommend.

Anyway, hope you all are having a good winter! I'll see you in a few days with a new video!