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3 Body Problem (2024)

Rushed, superficial, speedrunning mockery of an adaptation

My main impression of the Tencent series from 2023 was that it was too slow in a certain part in the middle, while the rest was appropriately paced, so I was hoping that and only that was what Netflix were going to cut down to keep only the good parts. Instead, Netflix did a really strange teen-brained speedrun style of adaptation where even the "good parts" are being rushed through like someone's trying to get this thing done as fast as possible to move on to the next project. It's almost like they're intentionally making a mockery of this whole thing, with no time to build appropriate suspense about world-changing discoveries, no time to build deep characters worth caring about, no realism to the science-talk. Ironically I think even the live-action/full-realism presentation of the 3D game is detracting from the impression that part should be making, whereas the lower-grade more early-2000s 3D renderings in the Chinese version seemed the correct way to do that.

As noted by others, the casting is pretty bad and the dialogues are edgy and un-dramatic, which absolutely ruins a story about world-shattering and mindblowing events. And it's not just the young "scientists" looking like fashion models and talking like videogame-playing teenagers (Jess Hong is actually one of the better actors here, just not given a lot of mature script to work with), but also older figures I would've expected far far more from (I'm looking at you Benedict Wong, what a disgrace of a performance). The detective and the nanotech scientist in the Chinese version were sooo much more likable characters it's actually shocking to see the difference. (Nice trick, casting "Ser Davos Seaworth", as well as "Samwell Tarly", as well as "The High Sparrow" from Game of Thrones, to get us to like this show, but not good enough - they didn't save your last show from your bad writing D&D, and they didn't save this one.)

I don't know if I even need to subject myself to any more of this after 4 episodes, it's plowing through everything so fast I'm afraid there might be spoilers already in the first season compared to what I've seen in the Chinese one. I may just stop watching this joke and go back to rewatch the Tencent version to refresh my memory on some of the subtleties and complexities going on there.

Domina: Control (2023)

Still very good but becoming repetitive

This is still a very enjoyable series, not far from season 1, I'm rating it as almost as good as Rome and equally as good as the best seasons of Spartacus (i.e the Andy Whitman seasons), but I do have to note it's become disappointingly repetitive in season 2 - we just go through a bit too many rehashes of the same pattern of "Livia gets some threat or obstacle to her plans -> Livia paces around furiously, swears like Geralt of Rivia a few times and thinks real hard -> Livia comes up with some brilliant solution, usually involving killing someone, allies help put that into practice and poof, everything is fine again".

I mean even if this is exactly what the documents show her life was like, the job of adaptation writers is to make it a bit more interesting than that, and I think most viewers are ready to accept deviations from the real history if those are put to good use keeping the story more engaging.

A Murder at the End of the World (2023)

Timely and necessary, though it could've been executed better

This is exactly what we need to hear right now, and in a way that makes it just like The East. I'm even a little surprised it came out as soon as it did after a certain wave of technological hype to which this is the exactly right Human Response.

It's not perfect, after the first 2-3 episodes I rated it 8/10 and as it went on I was getting more and more disappointed, especially by the frequent flashbacks - there's nothing I hate more than overused flashbacks. And the logic of some of the developments and the statements being made by supposedly-competent people left A LOT to be desired, but the core statements being made here and the reveal at the end did save the whole construction for me, so ultimately I have to push my rating all the way up, just because of the social importance of the message.

Fargo (2014)

Odd ones are the best

Here it is, finally, Fargo's back. Season 5 wiping away the shame that was the last season and getting back to the best parts which were seasons 1 and 3, with S2 not too far below them but ultimately just decent. I don't know why people thought 1 and 2 were the best, as there's a distinct feeling in S2 that it's just a continuation of S1, plus as someone else on here noted, it no longer has the compelling characters (or was it the actors?) - and I would say nor the as-fascinating twisty-turny story - to be quite up to the level of S1.

Of course this may be premature as S5 has just gotten going, but I'd been waiting for "reparations" after S4 and I had to comment immediately that I already like how this is starting out. Feels like the best of Fargo again, so to me this show is back on track.

Upload (2020)

One of the best things on streaming today

Beautiful 3rd season, got back up to 100% of the humor from season 1 after some slowing down we saw in season 2. The acting is still great, the story is still moving along with interesting developments and twists, and the cherry on top that makes this one of the best shows in active production is how they manage to elbow-in some issue-specific wholesome pro-social messages at just the right times.

This is one of those rare gems that manage to balance out seriousness with comedy and tech-intelligence with social/emotional intelligence in a way that doesn't feel forced or collaged together, it delivers just the right amount of each of the things it's mixing in, and just turns out to be all the way enjoyable without a single wasted moment.

Cidade Invisível (2021)

Decent first season, not great overall

From the very beginning this made me think it was Brazilians trying to make their own version of the mystical and awesome and unforgettable Colombian "Frontera Verde", but in the first season there wasn't much that was similar about it, the story stood on its own, and it was decent/good, a solid 7/10. It didn't really need a continuation but for some reason they made an S2, and there the similarities to Frontera Verde got more blatant and annoying, at the same time as the writing got more incoherent and boring, and along with the bad acting from a lot of the cast, this ultimately turned it into a "not particularly recommended" for me, as a whole.

But sure, do watch just the first season and stop there, if you're looking for something about environmentally conscious indigenous beliefs and mythical creatures protecting the land etc. (I just wish they had done more to explain what these creature names were supposed to mean to us viewers who didn't grow up with their stories and knew nothing about them.)

The Orville (2017)

Another tough one to give an overall rating to after its terribad last season

For its first 2 seasons, this thing was the closest thing to what trek-starved fans were begging for, especially coming up against the abysmal and insulting performances that were ST:Discovery and Picard S1&2 (except the Jurati scenes/arc). Sure it took S1 a number of episodes to find its footing in that Neutral Zone between being a Trek parody and a proper episodic planet-exploring philosophical Trek, but it got there, it found a great formula and it was blowing it out of the park, putting CBS to absolute shame.

Then Strange New Worlds came out and you would've thought we now had a competition on our hands, but at the same time Orville S3 decided to turn... fully serious (and fully pretentious)? MacFarlane ma' man. You're no Roddenberry. Apparently you're not even as good as the people working on (most of) SNW. The scripts to Orville S3 are preachy and boring, the humor is essentially dead, and to top it all off you decided to shove your white high-class musical tastes down our throats by blasting classical music at us every 15 minutes (I had to watch the whole season with my finger on the fast-forward button once I realized the music problem wasn't a temporary thing).

If you're going to make an S4, please return to all that was great about 1&2. The stuff you did in S3 was not what people were cheering for when they asked for long-term continuation. Let's just quietly pretend S3 never existed and return to the S1&2 style that made The Orville worthwhile (especially now that you stand about a snowflake's chance against SNW, trying to do serious episodic Trek).

Foundation: Creation Myths (2023)

So this is the way they're going with it. *sigh*

Welp, after the best episode in the whole series so far which was S2E9 I fully expected the next one to be worse, but this was quite a surprising amount of disappointment. Super-technology that no one ever had the chance to build undetected just pops up out of nowhere at just the right moment; an antagonist that's an absolute caricature with a weaker excuse for 'motivations' than even a comic book villain like Thanos; certain people refusing to die and staying in the story for yet more hundreds of years; mentalics arc gets resolved through what feels like a cheap last-minute retcon... my hopes for the next season are now much lower than last time, when even knowing they weren't following the books I thought they still had enough possibilities open to make their version good. But with S2E10 things are taking a distinctly stupider direction than I expected. (And can we please kill Gaal Dornick soon, or at least her useless personal-drama dialogues? Now that Salvor Hardin is finally gone only Gaal remains to massively drag down this show's character roster and dialogues.)

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Among the Lotus Eaters (2023)

This is how it's done

One of the best SNW episodes by far, this is what Star Trek should be, this is the kind of episode that always carried the show: sci-fi scenarios on other planets, with other races, holding up a mirror and having us ask the deepest questions about the human condition.

Sure, the tinnitus-like ringing was horrible for those of us who already have the real thing - we had to watch the whole episode with our finger stuck to the mute/unmute button, but that inconvenience was not enough for me to lower the score for what this type of episode represents: Star Trek with a Brain, the essence that always gave Star Trek shows their greatness.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Subspace Rhapsody (2023)

God please no

I love this series, it's the rebirth of true Star Trek for me, and I love this season, at least its best episodes are better than the best episodes of season 1, but...

The crossover episode #7 was audacious/comical and way out there, and that was perfectly fine as I also knew and enjoyed the other series they crossed SNW with. But one was enough, there shouldn't be more than one such episode per season in a series that's fundamentally "serious". I definitely did not enjoy E9, and actually found it less watchable than the worst episode of S1 - the storybook one. Maybe because I never liked musicals, maybe because it reeked of the white pretentiousness that was all-pervasive in MacFarlane's 3rd season, where he was shoving his "high-class/high-culture music" in our faces like his rich-white tastes were supposed to be automatically educational or cultivating to everyone.

So yeah, worst episode so far, highest percentage of episode runtime that I had to fast-forward over. As someone else said, I hope they never do this again.

Extrapolations (2023)

Have to give a high rating because of the topic, but

The closest this comes to not being a soulless glossy waste of money (and CO2 emissions during production) is the whale episode. Most of the other stories are almost completely uninteresting if not for the advanced stages of the environmental catastrophe and the little violent conflicts here and there. And worst of all the character drama is far more disconnected from the environmental problems than I ever imagined would be the case in such a TV series with such a pre-announced synopsis - I thought it would at least be on par with Years and Years (2019) but I was sorely disappointed. The rabbi story arc is by far the most irritating with how long it goes on vs. How irrelevant it is to the environmental discussion we should have been having in such a show.

And besides being preachy and smug and boring, the second great way this show ends up being rather anti-environmentalist is its choice of showing a disastrous climate future still featuring an unabated growth in our production of newer and newer technologies, with barely a hint of negative comment on the horrifying expansion of mining operations everywhere that this would require, as if CO2 was the only environmental problem and the places we're destroying through all the mining we need for all the damned technology didn't matter.

If there's any hope to fix this show in a season 2, it's if they get their act together and 1. Wake up to the fact that CO2 and warming are FAR from the only environmental problems bringing our civilization and supporting ecosystems to the brink of collapse, 2. Stop being so smug and preachy and 3. Re-watch Years and Years and learn something about making the character drama more relatable and more closely linked to the environmental catastrophes (and put more of the destruction in front of our eyes, we barely even got to see the destroyed environment this season!).

Severance (2022)

Excellent.

Excellent excellent excellent. High quality production, great acting, and a very intriguing sci-fi psychological mystery driving it. This reminds me of Maniac (2018) - also 80s-themed, also psychology-focused sci-fi mystery with really "out there" phenomena making it hard to stop watching once you've started.

It's great to see there's still some real creativity in the TV script writing arena with these superbly intriguing sci-fi-going-on-paranormal shows like Severance, Maniac or Russian Doll S1 (only season 1!). The only 1 point I had to subtract from 10/10 was for the somewhat excessive use of "walking along identical corridors turning various corners" scenes, and of the "annoying nosy neighbor lady" interactions, neither of which added much quality to the show. The rest is just stellar. Gimme more, and soon.

Nobody (2021)

Fun action-comedy

I was misled by other reviews into thinking this was a "serious" action flic, but it's really so over the top it's definitely action-comedy, and once you accept that it's a fun ride all the way. It's what John Wick should've been: a one-off from adult enough writers to admit this level of over-the-top action can only be presented as action-comedy to anyone over the age of 12. :)

No idea why anyone would talk about Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul as having anything to do with the character of this show, this is just a fun, shut your brain down for an hour and a half, big ol' serving of cinematic fast-food.

Rise of Empires: Ottoman (2020)

Baselessly overhyped

Not what most of the reviews are serenading about, not even close. This feels like a documentary mixed with a dramatization where the dramatization has not been put any thought into and has no substance - most of the time the actors sound like they're just reciting facts from a history manual plus some glaringly obvious logical implications of those facts. Even when they get a bit emotional about their delivery they're still not giving us any substance beyond the historical facts (which some say are not even all completely factual anyway).

As for the acting, I don't know if it was the broken English virtually everyone was speaking, but I found almost half of them to be terrible actors, and Uzumoglu towers above them by being simply decent, competent, nothing more by usual dramatic standards. Also Büyüküstün is a good actress, I think all the actors playing Pashas were decent, also Sokullu playing Giustiniani, then Gözüsirin playing Radu, and Andrei Micu were decent as well. Sadly Nuta as Vlad was eyrollingly bad, with his un-manly "Bucharest edgyboi" voice and his immersion-breaking amateurism.

Going into this I really thought for some reason that all the Turkish scenes were going to be in Turkish, everything about the Romans in Latin, everything Romanian in Romanian etc., but I guess it was too much work for this team. We're living in times when production teams routinely come up with completely new languages just for sci-fi productions, and this "historical" show couldn't even bother to have the actors speak the authentic, existing and well-known languages that the figures they're portraying spoke in their time, even after choosing actors of the appropriate ethnicity who wouldn't have needed any extra language coaching to do it? Between this and the bad acting and the poverty of actual content, I really don't understand what everyone got so excited about here.

Manifest (2018)

Nosedive

Starts out intriguing, like an 8/10, possibly 9/10 show, but as it develops it gets more and more formulaic and boring, and around S3 becomes actually unwatchable without frequent fast-forwarding to get to the actual plot developments.

Two major elements drag this thing down by a good 1/10 each:

• Grace. Just Grace. All of Grace. Every time she opens her mouth the show's quality immediately goes down. If they ever make a fan-edit version I hope they delete every single scene where Grace has anything to say, anything at all.

• The Angelina arc. All of it after she first starts talking about being special is pure trash and an unwelcome distraction having nothing whatsoever to do with the airplane.

Beyond that, some minor things they could fix are with all the unimportant mysteries they keep adding and getting worked up about that lead nowhere, while much more important mysteries are sitting unanswered since day 1. But maybe I'm being too demanding here, maybe if they already have a good long-term plan all that matters will be revealed, and maybe it would've all felt like it had timely resolutions for everything important if ee hadn't had to suffer through Grace and Angelina.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

The definition of 'epic fail'

This is what took 13 years to make? Seriously? Who directed this like a videogame and overly sped-up action scenes-horny teenager and where have they buried the real James Cameron? I will definitely not go back to the theater for any more Avatar movies after this fiasco, I will wait for them to stream or not watch them at all. I didn't even feel the 3D as much this time either, it was a fairly flat movie with a few moments of 3D when projectiles were flying at me or particles floating in front of the image. No more proper pacing, no more slowing down some scenes to create actual awe and wonder, everything is fast-paced like it's made by a complete maniac. What a let-down, wow. It's not even a "visual spectacle" this time because all the plants and animals look like plastic figurines in a videogame's cutscenes (which is only made even more obvious and jarring if you see it in HFR), so it failed even at its most basic task. And as many have said, the writing is also bottom of the barrel stuff, again like the "script" for your average videogame between-missions cinematics. Considering this and the Dark Fate fiasco I'm starting to believe James Cameron is actually dead and has been replaced by a lookalike just to keep the marketing going.

The Woman King (2022)

Good movie, worth the cinema trip

I went in afraid that some of the reviewers were right in saying the runtime is excessive, that it should've been cut down etc., but that wasn't my experience at all. I didn't find any scene unnecessary or too slow, the pieces fit just fine, the acting was good, the dialogues, the action. Only bad parts I can mention are some personal-life developments for the characters and some parts of the inspirational speeches felt cheesy or childishly simplified, but that's about all that makes me downgrade this from a 10/10. Most of it was good, it turned out to be one of those more and more rare occasions where I go see a Hollywood movie in the theater and don't come out feeling it was money out of the window.

(Yes, yes, it wasn't exactly historically accurate, but it was what it needed to be in order to bring to the public's attention certain ideas about slavery while also using the history-based idea of the "African Amazons" to actually get butts in cinema seats. So yeah, it won't substitute for a history lesson, but it achieved what it was trying to achieve with the historical material it had to work with.)

Yakamoz S-245 (2022)

What "Into the Night" Should've Been

This is a better version of "Into the Night", also driven by the character drama but with just a bit more focus on the logistics and science/technology aspects, with incomparably better dialogues, better plot and better acting (and the acting in ItN was already good, mind you - here it's excellent). Of course there are not-so-logical plot developments here and there, that's why it's not a 10/10 but once you get past those (as you always have to with sci-fi anyway), the rest is really enjoyable.

I hope they continue this one and I hope they don't take over any of the continuation ideas into ItN because I refuse to watch any more ItN after its shamefully bad first season.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022)

Finally

I was *this* close to giving up on anything called Star Trek, and then they finally get it right. No more war war war grimdark death and destruction everywhere, no more every character's a goddamned edgelord who can't seem to find a good moment to shut up or stop promoting themselves and their ideas, no more self-exploration overextended to the almost complete exclusion of any space exploration. Just Star Trek, as it was meant to be.

Stranger Things (2016)

Good show, not a masterpiece, calm down

It's an OK paranormal show, I don't understand why it's getting so much attention though, it's not like it's a masterpiece or anything. Sure, they did the 80s vibe really well, but that's impressive for about the first season. Then the fact that they tried to "scientifically explain" the paranormal phenomena at the end of S1 was pretty darn cringe and made me never want to see another minute of this show after that, which I didn't. One season and done, that's all the attention this show deserved.

Russian Doll (2019)

Watch Season 1 and Stop

Season 1 was fresh and worth every minute of full attention, solid 9/10, might even up that to a 10 after a re-watch some time later. But Season 2... is like it's not even the same show. There's barely any hint of a story and most of what happens is uninteresting. I'm only halfway in and I struggle to find a reason to keep moving and to watch another episode.

I wanted to average out the ratings for the two seasons like I usually do, but you know what, people might skip the very good Season 1 if they see that kind of rating, so I'll do what I saw someone else on here do and just rate the good part to draw attention to it.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Let's face it, Gal Gadot can't act

Same as the first movie, Gal Gadot comes off as an airheaded bimbo who couldn't act to save her life. Any semblance of behaving like an adult woman is from the staff telling her what to do, and that still can't cover up for her teen-brained cluelessness. Nothing else to say about the movie, it's basically an Indiana Jones shpiel about some cursed ancient artifact, a total yawnfest. Don't waste your time on this movie.

Euphoria (2019)

Going downhill fast, eaten away by its pretentiousness

The best part were the specials about Rue and Jules. Watching those before everything else made me think this was a very different show from what it actually is, and that it was indeed the 10/10 a lot of people seemed to think it was. Nope, S1 was just very good TV, not a masterpiece by any stretch, and S2 was simply disappointing after trying too hard to be artsy with the supremely annoying and unrelatable Lexi arc, and trying too hard to... I have no idea what, with the annoying and depressing and useless Nate/dad/family arc. I hope they refocus the show and give up on the artsy-pretentious try-harding, or this is headed straight toward unwatchable.

Nyitva (2018)

Well done light comedy

This was funnier than I expected, I think I even enjoyed it more than the Spanish "Donde caben dos" / "More the Merrier", even though it showed less actual swinging or "action", and less diversity of situations.

Lulli (2021)

Waste of a good premise

Weak acting from the lead and not-great from the others, weak script, this thing is a chore to watch, I couldn't make it past 1/3. I've seen good Brazilian productions and this ain't one of them.