“3 Body Problem” Is a Rare Species of Sci-Fi Epic

The present-day story of the Oxford Five is juxtaposed with that of a young woman named Ye Wenjie (a phenomenal Zine Tseng), whom we see come of age during China’s Cultural Revolution, and whose physicist father was killed as part of the C.C.P.’s anti-intellectual purge. Wenjie is a brilliant scientist in her own right, albeit one who’s forced to tread carefully in a fraught political landscape. Her troubles are exacerbated by Mao’s brutal development projects, which she fears will do lasting damage to the environment—a concern shared by an American activist named Mike Evans (played as a young man by Ben Schnetzer and as an elderly one by Jonathan Pryce, that master of wild-eyed conviction). Their shared disillusionment has far-reaching implications, particularly after Wenjie decides that it might be time for someone else—maybe even anyone else—to take Homo sapiens’s place at the top of the proverbial food chain.