Netflix’s Three-Body Problem adaptation is ambitious, and one of the standout scenes is the destruction of the ship in the Panama Canal. Here’s how the team did it.
Adapting Cixin Liu’s scientifically dense novel The Three-Body Problem is no easy feat. The book is filled with page after page of detailed descriptions of scientific processes, from the impact three suns would have on a single planet to how a proton-sized supercomputer could interfere with the results of every particle accelerator on Earth simultaneously.
It’s a challenge for showrunners David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo for sure, as they had to make tough decisions on which elements of the novel to show, which to tell, and which to simply gloss over. But it was also an especially difficult job for the Netflix 3 Body Problem series’ visual effects team, who were tasked with bringing many of the novel’s most difficult concepts to life — communicating advanced scientific processes described in painstaking detail in the book, but understandably slimmed down to their core visual elements for a television audience.
“We definitely had some challenges with the more abstract stuff,” VFX supervisor Stefen Fangmeier, who worked with Benioff and Weiss on Game of Thrones, told Polygon. “For some of it, they basically just copied it straight out of the book, and now I have to figure out what it should look like. [Like] inside the particle accelerator to show how [the Sophon] is disrupting these particle elements, and the dimensional unfolding from the 10th dimension of a proton down to two dimensions. Even stuff like the countdown. It’s incredibly challenging, because we did so many versions of that, and didn’t want it to look like an alarm clock, but it had to be legible.”
Fangmeier says a crucial part of the sprawling VFX team was BUF, a Paris-based company who worked on the Neil deGrasse Tyson-hosted revamp of the science documentary series Cosmos. Their experience in high science work (and their in-house software) was “essential” in the team’s ability to communicate some of the more difficult scientific processes.
One of the biggest projects for the VFX team (and the whole 3 Body Problem crew) was the graphic destruction of a large ship and everyone on board as it passes through the Panama Canal in episode 5. It’s the kind of VFX challenge talented teams thrive on: a big moment you can conceptualize in theory but for which we have no real-world example to draw from. Adapted directly from one of the most memorable and horrifying sequences from the book, the sequence depicts what happens when nanowires are used to slice through a gigantic sea vessel, killing thousands on board.
