The Wandering Earth (2019)

The Wandering Earth has the honour of being China's first big budget sci-fi movie. It was released in China during the lunar new year and immediately became the highest grossing movie in China. Strangely the movie was not widely released worldwide .. until now, but through Netflix streaming. Not exactly a good thing since it means the rest of the world will probably not be able to witness this big budget special effects laden science fiction on the big screen.

The title of the movie is reflective of the movie's admittedly preposterous premise. In a future end of the world premise, the sun is exploding and that means earth will perish eventually. To escape this eventuality, scientists around the world have come up with a plan move the entire planet out of the solar system into a more hospitable location (that location, I may add was never made known to the audience). To propel the earth out of orbit, thousands of huge engines were built across one side of the globe! The surviving population will have to live underground in what is envisioned to be a 2,500 years mission!!

As I said, the premise is preposterous which end up conjuring up many questions as to how this can even possibly be achieved by modern science! Of course as in any science fiction, there has to be a certain level of disbelief that requires us to disregard in order to enjoy the story's possibilities. In this case, however, there are so many questions bugging us about how the things depicted on screen can be possible, that becomes a major distraction.

On the plus side, it is refreshing to see sci-fi taken on a different approach from the usual Hollywood path, although much of the movie did seem to draw inspiration from the genre. The sentimentalism, heroism, and patriotism are shamelessly thrown in amidst the mayhem and global disaster happening around them. It is also refreshing to see an almost all Chinese speaking cast and having Asian as the heroes of the day. Credit should also be given to the technical quality of the movie which is of high standard, and there were some nice ideas on how living underground in such a future would be like. It was also cool to see the famous Shanghai skyline under tons of snow in a post Armageddon world, and the sequence inside the Shanghai Tower provided some genuinely tense moments.

All in I found the Wandering Earth to be an interesting watch but not totally satisfying due to its overly ambitious but ludicrous story, and irrational behaviour of its main characters bordering on over sentimental during a time of crisis.