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.
I finished it but just barely, rolling my eyes the whole time. I guess it’s supposed to be insightful about Chinese attitudes towards geopolitics if you finish the series, but the first book was dull and the interesting ideas were marred by being almost pure magic with barely a pretense of science to make them work.
The dark forest doesn’t apply in real life, and as a thought experiment doesn’t hold up either. I recently declared it to be another example of techbros re-inventing pascal’s wager.
This is a tad harsh – we don’t know what applies in real-life alien interactions, and it’s as plausible as 100 things from other sci fi stories.