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The Appropriate Tune: "The Wanderer", by Dion
When it comes to Western audiences and Chinese cinema, we’ve often been stuck with two things: Martial arts films and period piece dramas, or some combination of the two. Not for lack of trying, I’m pretty sure the Chinese have a thing about being viewed as a semi-feudal society steeped in mystical stereotypes, but unfortunately it often feels that genre fiction with a Chinese perspective doesn’t get a fair shake on the other side of the pond. Chinese horror, Chinese science fiction, Chinese film noir with supernatural elements, you know the hardcore shit. Whether that’s due to racist attitudes by the West, some sort of low-key cultural warfare thing, or I’m just that unobservant, I don’t know . So when I do happen to find one, and I have a good enough excuse (like, say an annual 31 movie marathon), I tend to jump on it. So it was with Animal World a while back, and so it is today.
Released in 2019 though the China Film Group Corporation, The Wandering Earth was directed by Frant Gwo and written by Gwo, Gong Ge’er, Yan Dongxu, Ye Junce, Yang Zhixue, Wu Yi and Ye Ruchang, all of which was based on a story by celebrated science fiction writer Liu Cixin. The world is absolutely fucked, and for once it’s not humanity’s fault. Nope, it turns out that the sun is degenerating, and in about 100 years it’s going to take out Earth and the entire solar system with it. In order to save mankind the governments of the world decide to team up and reenact their favorite Spongebob meme by tricking out the planet with a couple hundred rocket engines and pushing it somewhere else, namely in Alpha Centauri, as human beings eke out a existence in enormous underground cities for the 2,500 years it takes to get there. How exactly humanity is supposed to fix the ecosystem once there when all non-human life is now extinct, but I guess we didn’t need all those animals and plants anyway.
For the past seventeen years things have been going relatively smoothly, but then one day everything decides to go wrong. Not only do the rockets end up malfunctioning, which plunges the underground cities into chaos, but a gravitational spike on Jupiter screws up Earth’s trajectory, pulling it onto a collision course which will most definitely not turn out well for anyone involved. The human race is looking down the barrel of a gun, and it’s only hope seems to lie in a ragtag group of rescue workers, scientists and normal citizens, including teenage inventor Liu Qi. If he manages to get over his daddy issues that is.
The Wandering Earth is what you might call a ‘money shot’ kind of movie, by which I mean one of the main goals of the film is to show off the special effects budget. About 90% of this movie is covered in CGI and dipped in slow-mo, and while that might give one flashbacks to SharkBoy and Lava Girl, the imaging work done here is very impressive in terms of scope and the complexity of the design. It still doesn’t look quite ‘real’, but it’s about as close as you can get in this day and age. Combined with the set design and practical effects, which bring to mind something out of Prometheus or Pacific Rim (a spacesuit with a minigun attached to it does seem more suited to take out xenomorphs than it does for rescue missions), The Wandering Earth might be one of the better looking science fiction films I’ve seen in a long time. Of course most of the science fiction films I watch tend to be a few decades old, but it’s still very impressive.
Story-wise The Wandering Earth hits a bit different from what you might be used to in other films as well. The closest thing to an antagonist is a HAL ripoff who kind of slows some of our characters down, and there’s no romance whatsoever. No this film is built on family, friends, community working together to overcome obstacles, in this case the obstacle of preventing the entire planet from being destroyed. Which, admittedly, is the kind of thing you’d want to devote most of your attention to, but it seems that many disaster movies can’t get by without it. Titanic, Armageddon, what have you. For those aromantic people out there, this might be a nice change of pace.
The flipside to this then is that rather than focusing on one or two people we are instead flooded with characters, and I think that unfortunately the film suffers because of that. While they make sure to give everyone a name and a chance to do something plot-wise, personally I ended up forgetting most of them who were besides the more blatant tropey ones. This ends up affecting our protagonist Liu Qi as well, as he starts off as something of a shithead and it never felt to me like he ever moved beyond that. The resolution of the arc between him and his father Peiqiang also rang hollow, partially because of that and partially because the two characters literally have no interaction with each other prior to that exact moment. Honestly in spite of it lifting stuff from 2001: A Space Odyssey I prefer the Peiqiang parts of the film to the Liu Qi. Not only is Peiqiang a more entertaining character Liu Qi, but because he gets more solo time as a character you get more of a chance to connect with his character. It might be derivative, but you could have expanded his part to the whole film and I wouldn’t have minded. It would’ve given Makarov more screen time anyway.
Also, while I would call The Wandering Earth a competently written movie, certainly not a common feat with films that have a half a dozen writers in the credits. Excluding the absurd premise of turning the entire planet into a generation ship, because sci-fi needs an idea from which to grow, but some of the things the characters do just come off as downright stupid. I understand the need for Liu Qi’s obstinance in regards to building drama, but it seems contrived given the enormity of the stakes involved. Complaining about getting roped into a rescue mission and wanting to go home would make more sense if the planet weren’t set to collide with a gas giant in a half hour. Later on there’s a scene where the rescue team arrives at an engine in need of relighting, only to find it destroyed by magma. The team is discouraged, which leads to arguing, when suddenly one of the team pulls out her gun and shoots the mechanism designed to relight the engine, on the basis of wanting ‘no more dying’. Besides the fact that if you wanted to get attention you could just shoot your gun in the air, this train of thought is so fucking stupid that even another character calls her out on it. They make it clear that these mechanisms aren’t exactly plentiful, so by destroying it not only do you ensure that the sacrifice of those who got it that far was in vain, but you are actively endangering the entire human race in the quite likely possibility that the other engines malfunction in the future. It’s pissing me off a little just thinking about it, especially because the writers pull a deus ex machina immediately afterwards and render the entire scene pointless. Bad, bad writing on their part.
Reflecting upon everything that goes down, The Wandering Earth is not only a ‘money shot’ film, it’s one of those movies that would have been better as a miniseries. While Frant Gwo manages to keep things moving at a reasonable pace, there are definitely times where the plot is straining under the weight of everything it’s trying to set up, and the constant use of slow-mo and action setpieces strain the seriousness of the events taking place in the movie. Spread it out over a couple of episodes and you give everyone room to breathe, do some world building, some character development, and you’d still have enough excitement to carry the audience through the story.
Overall I’m going to give The Wandering Earth the recommendation. In a world that’s constantly reminding us of how shitty it is, it’s nice to get something every now and that reminds us how strong we can be when we work together. Not strong enough to keep the sun from exploding perhaps, but I think we’re a lot more capable than we realize. We’ve just gotta try. Maybe you’ll want to try this movie too.
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