Something is just off. For the readers of the original novel, you know how carefully Cixin Liu planted every detail, slowly guided you into that plot trap, and boom, a crazy idea with a magnificent scene showed up and blew you away. That is not something to be found here in this show, it's all because of the pacing, everything is raging forward, and the big ideas just flows out like the rest of the story, nothing special, nothing epic. I cannot speak for those who have never read the book before, but I doubt people can really catch the essence of those big ideas. It has nothing to do with casting, recreating or anything, I'm not criticizing those.
And if you find the characters in the original book are flat enough, somehow David & Dan find a way to make characters in this show even more flat, more flat than those dehydrated Trisolarans. By the way they call them Santi now which is probably the only thing loyal to the original novel. That is the price of building 5 (or 4, or more than 5, who cares) protagonists at the same time in a show less than 9 hours. The good thing is the way they rearranged the story line did left plenty of space for the protagonists to grow in future seasons. Let's just hope the crew use this to their advantage in the next few seasons.
Everything else is just a typical Netflix show, industry standard production, industry standard cinema, industry standard everything. For that it deserves a solid 7/10. It's a good show, and if you are not familiar with the original you might find some parts quite intriguing, first few episodes might be bit slow if you don't have any idea where the plot is heading but get better after ep3. It is what it is, it's a TV show detouring from the book and ,at least the first season, isn't your typical epic Sci-fi. It tries to please everyone but hardly satisfies anyone. Hope to see how things develop next season.
