The showrunners behind Game of Thrones are finally releasing a new series—and we now have the official main trailer.
The highly anticipated genre-bending mystery series, 3 Body Problem, is from creators David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and The Terror: Infamy showrunner Alexander Woo. The new show is based on the best-selling book series "The Three Body Problem" by Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin and will premiere globally on Netflix on March 21.
It is Benioff and Weiss' first series since the controversial ending of Game of Thrones. The duo had previously been working on a new trilogy set in the Star Wars universe, but exited the Lucasfilm project to focus on their development deal with Netflix.
In Liu's books, Three-Body is an immersive virtual reality game that transports players to lifelike recreations of different moments from the distant past. The trilogy also chronicles humanity's first contact with an alien civilization from a nearby system of three sun-like stars orbiting one another.
Throughout eight episodes, 3 Body Problem is set to take viewers on a journey spanning continents and timelines—from the 1960s Cultural Revolution in China to the present-day streets of Oxford, the United Nations in New York, and the Panama Canal.
The Netflix series tells the story of Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng), a Chinese woman and astrophysicist who is conscripted into the military on a top-secret mission in the 1960s and eventually makes a fateful decision that impacts the present. Because of this, a group of scientists and an unorthodox detective have to work together to confront the greatest threat in humanity's history when the laws of nature begin to unravel.
The newly released trailer flashes back and forth between scenes, starting with a character named Da Shi (played by Benedict Wong) walking down a dark corridor as his voiceover says: "There must be 30 dead scientists in the past month." He then directs his flashlight to a wall, where numbers have been written over and over again, and he adds: "Christ, another countdown."
It then flashes to a woman known as Auggie Salazar (Eiza González) on a train who keeps seeing numbers counting down, impacting her vision. "Has anyone else seen it? What happened to them?" she asks Da in another shot. The scene then cuts back to Da with his flashlight, which eventually reveals the words "I still see it" written on the wall.
The trailer continues with a variety of preview shots of what's to come, including a scene where a man puts on a futuristic-looking headset as a woman warns him: "Prepare yourself for something very strange."
The trailer, which can be seen here, ends with a voiceover that says: "They are coming and there's nothing you can do to stop them."
The series also stars Game Of Thrones veterans John Bradley, Liam Cunningham and Jonathan Pryce alongside Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Alex Sharp, Saamer Usmani, Rosalind Chao, Marlo Kelly, Sea Shimooka and Ben Schnetzer.
While it hasn't been made clear how closely the creators will be following the books, speaking about the series with Tudum.com, Woo explained his, Benioff and Weiss' process.
"What we are hoping to do is to convey the experience—if not necessarily the exact details—of the novel onto the screen," he said. "What stayed, we hope, is the sense of wonderment and the sense of scope, of scale, where the problems are no longer just the problems of an individual or even a nation, but of an entire species."
In a teaser trailer that was previously released, neither Jack Rooney (Bradley) nor Jin Cheng (Hong) seem to know much about a metallic headset in their possession beyond the fact that it looks nothing like any other gaming rigs on the market.
When Jack puts the headset on, he's physically transported to a different world that feels incredibly real. While he's busy taking it all in, an unknown woman (Shimooka) suddenly appears and tells him he wasn't invited before slicing him with a sword. Even though this trailer didn't provide much more information, readers of Liu's novels should have an idea of what's going on.
The Netflix series was originally announced in September 2020, which resulted in pushback from U.S. senators because of controversial comments Liu made in a 2019 interview with The New Yorker.
When he was asked about the mass internment of Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, he said he supported the Chinese government's treatment of the ethnic group. The government has committed a series of human rights abuses against Uyghurs and has held them in "re-education" camps in the northwestern province of Xinjiang.
"Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks?" Liu said. "If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty."
Five Republican U.S. senators penned a letter to Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer and co-CEO, condemning the platform's decision to work with the author because of these comments.
Per the Independent, Netflix responded to the letter with a statement, reading: "Mr Liu is a Chinese citizen living in China—he is the author of the books, not the creator of this Netflix series." It added: "Netflix judges individual projects on their merits. We do not agree with his comments, which are entirely unrelated to his book or this Netflix show."
3 Body Problem premieres on Netflix March 21.
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