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 guess, but the sciencyness being so silly didn't work for me. Lovecraft style cosmic horror just straight up says "there are weird aliens who are totally bizarre and incomprehensible and they do psychic space magic for reasons your pathetic mammal brain will never understand and even a glancing encounter with them is so strange it will destroy your mind" and i can get behind that because it's fun silly.
This is just "hey, what if your neighbors were total assholes?"
Once the sophons show up there's no tension for the rest of the story bc it's just like "oh, the trisolarans have magic and can do anything they want no matter how little sense it makes." Like a big part of horror is gradually figuring out what the enemy is and realizing how totally fucked you are, but the sophons aren't possible and don't follow any physical rules so it's just like "welp, guess we're fucked then".
I always compare it to revelation space, another story that explores the Dark Forest idea.
spoiler
The Wolves in Revelation Space are real fucking weird, but you get deep, deep in to the story before you really even get the edges of what they are and what they're really capable of. The first book in the series is full of rapidly escalating "oh shit moments as the scale of how totally fucked everything is ratchets up again and again and again. The bad guys have a lot of space-magic that definitely does not agree with physics, but they're also up against fairly hard limits - lightspeed travel takes a long time, ftl is impossible, even the super-high tech alien spookies still need to respect conservation of energy. When they finally pull out their trump card it's the scale that is completely horrifying.
The second book is legit terrifying in so many ways. I don't even want to read it again. Third book is ok but nothing special. The ending was a bit meh for me but there is an ending at least.