It’s like someone asked ChatGPT to turn the book into a dumb anglo sitcom.
-Every character is emotionally immature, spiteful, and sassy. None of the ‘friends’ act like friends. None of the characters talk like real people. They’re constantly insulting or hitting each other. It’s just embarrassing. The actors have nothing to work with.
-All the major twists/reveals are shown in the first two episodes. No suspense, no build-up, no pay-off. Rushed is an understatement.
-Single characters from the book have been unnecessarily split into multiple new characters adding nothing to the story.
-The story is a cosmic horror but comedy and romance have been forced in for no reason whatsoever except as filler, which is even more mind-boggling because they’ve essentially rushed all of the good stuff in the book to make room for unfunny jokes.
-Apparently they could barely afford any sets and extras, so scenes and locations that are supposed to be bristling with sights and people just feel oddly empty. Even the special effects feel muted. The budget is just weirdly limited, and the show looks much cheaper than the Tencent series.
-Almost all of the science (which is the interesting stuff) has been gutted from this science fiction.
I hate anglo slop. Where is the kino. Tencent pls adapt The Dark Forest.
It’s bad folks
The Chinese tv show has 30 episodes. Meanwhile 5 episodes into the Netflix series and the story is already farther along than the entire Chinese first season . This is not an exaggeration.
Is Nexflix doing the whole trilogy? In a miniseries basically?
Yeah. The books jump around in time a lot between the present and future, so they’re doing all the whole series more chronologically with the book 2/3 protagonists’ stories happening concurrently with the first book story.
But also yeah it’s moving along very very quickly.
Average nextfix series moment
Taking your time and letting themes and events play out instead of jumping straight to the universe exploding is a concept alien to Anglo screenwriters
To be fair on that point, the pacing of the books also feels very fast.