Frant Gwo

Liu Lang Di Qiu/ The Wandering Earth (2019), adapted from a sci-fi novel by Liu Cixin of 2000, is a mediocre imitation of Hollywood's apocalyptic sci-fi films with little or no credible "sci" and rather unimaginative "fi". It simple speculates on the success of similar blockbusters in the USA, such as Interstellar (2014) and The Martian (2015), and in Russia, such as Klim Shipenko's Salyut-7 (2017). The science is totally implausible (even if there was a way to send the Earth to another solar planet, what are the chances that the conditions would be exactly the conditions required for living beings to survive?) The plot is mostly a collage of all the stereotypes that cinemagoers have become accustomed to over decades of sci-fi movies. Some of the visual effects are a bit amateurish (it is not difficult to guess that sometimes we are looking at toys) and sometimes comically derivative of famous films (like MOSS the computer that is very similar to HAL of Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey , made 50 years earlier, or the space station that is reminiscent of so many Star Wars-inspired galactic sagas, or the action in space that recalls Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity, or the icy landscape that is copied from Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow, in which climate change caused the entire planet to plunge into a new Ice Age). One can argue that the ambition of this film are bigger than of any previous film of the same kind. For example, there have been countless movies about galactic apocalypses, from When Worlds Collide (1951) to Michael Bay's Armageddon (1998), but certainly none aimed at sending the whole Earth into a cosmic journey. There have been desperate missions before, like The Core (2003), in which the heroes need to reach the center of the Earth to avoid that the planet stops spinning, but none that united the whole planet in a multi-generational project. The whole father-son relationship comes out as a bit comic, and the action does not build suspense precisely because it is so implausible (and because it sounds so familiar). All the commotion about the different scientific attempts to ignite Jupiter feels grotesquely amateurish (hopefully in the real world the human race would not depend on the inspiration of amateurs but on real scientists). Incidentally, humankind deserves to die if in the future the announcements about life and death of the entire planet will be delivered in the tone of train station's announcements. The only refreshing thing is that we finally see a film in which those who save the Earth are not from the USA. China has produced some of the best films of the last two decades. Hopefully this film doesn't mean that it has started to simply copy Hollywood's worst excesses.