The Wandering Earth (2019)
“The Wandering Earth” is a movie based on a book of the same name by Chinese author Liu Cixin. I’d never heard of the book or the author until the various tech and sci-fi blogs online started talking about the movie.
Now, it would be hard to call myself a science-fiction lover if I didn’t give another culture’s take on the genre a fair shake. Fortunately for me, Netflix is the main provider of “The Wandering Earth” for American viewers. I have no idea if they also did the English voice-over, but it’s there, and there’s a lot of weird choices.
The plot point that gets this movie going is that, for some reason, the sun has decided to die billions of years before it’s supposed to. Star death means drastic expansion; in our case, in real life, everything inside the asteroid belt is going to get consumed. For the movie, the entire solar system is doomed. The solution: build 10000 giant rocket engines around the planet to literally launch Earth out of Sol’s orbit and out to Alpha Centauri – a journey that will take 2500 years.
Sure.
All of the above makes about as much sense as “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004), “2012” (2012), or “Geostorm” (2018). The one thing that makes this concept even vaguely reasonable is that the “United Earth Government” or “UEG” (just the UN, but with a very slightly tweaked logo) has the goal of saving as much of humanity as possible within 30 years, which is when the sun’s expansion will turn our current ‘goldilocks zone’ orbital position into something deadly.
For no clearly explained reason, the UEG wants to/can only save 3.5 billion of Earth’s current 7.5 billion population in massive underground cities. But even for 3.5 billion, you might as well just move the entire planet instead of trying to build colony ships for all of them, so I’ll buy it for the sake of the story.
The story starts 17 years into this adventure, as Earth is wandering past Jupiter. An inexplicable “gravity spike” from the gas giant completely derails Earth’s trajectory and starts pulling it straight in, which somehow also causes roughly 3000 of those 10000 engines to “spontaneously” fail, all at the exact same time.
So it’s up to a rag-tag group of civilians and pseudo-military to save the day!
Said group is made up of Qi, his sister Duoduo (pronounced “Dodo”), Military Leader #1, Annoying Man #1, Scientists #1 and #2, and Adult Woman #1. There’s also Peiqiang (the dad, an astronaut), and Ziang (the grandfather). The character development arcs for everyone is roughly the same: non-existent.
At no point does anyone develop in any appreciable way. There are “sacrifices,” where a character dies in some stupid, vain attempt at “moving” the plot along, but with the exception of one, they’re never deaths that actually help with any forward progress. It’s like some weird lip-service to the idea of dying for the greater good, without any of those deaths actually benefiting the greater good.
Qi and Duoduo are tied for “characters I want to see die the most” here, yet neither do, unfortunately. Qi spends the entire time being angsty and mad at his dad for being onboard the space station that’s flying ahead of earth, while Duoduo is clearly in middle school yet talks and behaves like a 7 year old, complete with ‘lack of filter’ commentary, throwing a tantrum (complete with leg-flailing), and constant whimpering. If I was supposed to be rooting for them and their survival, then the movie failed spectacularly.
Which leads me to an interesting point: this is the first dubbed movie I’ve reviewed, and one of the very few non-western, not-English movies I’ve watched all the way through.
It’s a Chinese movie, with a majority Chinese cast, playing up Chinese values. Fair enough. American movies with American casts play up American values, so I won’t begrudge them that.
The thing that really threw me off, though, was how terrible the voice acting was. It was over-the-top dramatic, like I was watching a Spanish soap-opera. The characters spoke in a way that suggested whomever was reading the script was parsing English syntax for the first time, with weird pauses and dramatic tone pitches in ways that didn’t make sense.
Again, I get it: Chinese movie, Chinese style, secondary American audience. But if you’re going to get your movie dubbed for export, and you’re the host (Netflix) doing the dubbing, you should at least have the voice work be something that your audience would perceive as “normal” to listen to. This is especially exacerbated by the fact that the voice for Peiqiang, the dad, sounds like a completely normal, properly-practiced English speaker.
That said, I have no idea how Chinese audiences got to hear the Chinese dub of “Avengers: Endgame” and whether or not they feel the same as I do.
Unfortunately, everything of importance in this movie happens via deus ex machina. To restart the Earth engines, you need a ‘lighter core.’ Qi, Duoduo, and grandpa are stopped by the pseudo-military who need grandpa’s truck to move the core they have. There’s nothing special about grandpa’s truck, nor is it the only one in the scene. It’s just the one the ‘military’ picked for some reason. Down the road, literally and figuratively, the truck breaks down and something goes wrong with the core; Qi and Duoduo decide to wander off into the frozen nothingness.
Surprise! They happen to find a fully functional truck, with another core inside! And they happen to be close enough to the exact Earth engine necessary to make a difference!
As Jupiter is pulling Earth in, it’s aggressively sucking away our atmosphere. Thanks to a convenient flashback that Qi has to something his dad said 17 years prior, he remembers that Jupiter is mostly hydrogen, and thus can be detonated, and Earth can just ride the shockwave out of the gravity well. This also implies that our own atmosphere is highly flammable, which it obviously isn’t.
Why is a 22-year-old loser/deviant the only person to think of this?
Because the greatest scientific minds of the UEG have already considered it, and realized it was a stupid idea that would fail by all metrics.
But everyone wants it to work just so gosh-darn badly, and everyone knows the power of wants is stronger than any laws of physics.
A few engines rev into the red zone and Jupiter’s hydrogen atmosphere launches a column of fire at Earth, pushing the entire planet away.
It works, because plot device.
This is why I hated “Interstellar” (2014).
Even without a scientific background, it seems pretty obvious that the magnitude of shockwave energy the Earth would be battered with in order to knock it out of Jupiter’s orbit would probably also completely destroy our small blue marble, or at least destroy everything on the surface, including all of the giant engines.
The soundtrack was stellar, pun intended. As I’ve mentioned in many reviews before, well-done soundtracks are surprisingly few and far between, so kudos to whomever directed the score.
The special-effects, however, were mixed. Every scene that took place in space or on the space station was beautiful, easily on par with what we’ve come to expect thanks to movies like “Interstellar” (2014), “Passengers” (2016), or “The Martian” (2015). The scenes on the surface of our frozen planet were not. There were many shots that showed massive trucks hurtling across the global tundra, to and from the various mining locations to transport fuel for the megastructure engines, and every time those scenes came up it was like watching bad videogame graphics. There must have been two different CGI studios contracted to do these, because the quality differential is too vast for one group to have both succeeded and dropped the ball.
A few other notes I picked out:
The sole Russian character is portrayed by China is the same way Americans portray Russians: drunkards who talk about vodka all the time.
The trucks all have “steering orbs” instead of steering wheels. No reason is ever given or shown, other than to make them look “futuristic.”
The trucks used on the surface were shown to be bigger than 18 wheelers, but could drive much faster, were more stable, could make impossibly tight turns, and traversed snow/ice with no issue, all on (seemingly) regular rubber tires.
Almost every scene on the surface of Earth was lit as if it were daytime. While I’m sure the engines produced some light, the surface should have been pitch-black, based on how far Earth was from Sol by that point.
The Earth engines were huge, but clearly still within our atmosphere. Considering the narrated schedule of hundreds of years of burn time, it seems like they would have destroyed our atmosphere well before Jupiter could suck it away.
Speaking of which: any atmosphere we lost to Jupiter would be lost. Like, forever.
We clearly left the Moon behind.
An American flag was given a center shot for a scene. I wonder if that was some kind of nod to “The Martian” (book and movie) where China’s space program was the critical component to saving Mark Watney.
My final issue with this movie: the space station. For starters, the station wasn’t affected by the gravity spike (plot shields, up!). Second, there was an AI helper-bot that lived on the station with the human crew. It had a red “eye,” turned evil, and was one lazy script writer away from saying “I can’t let you do that Dave.”
In order to stop the AI, Peiqiang lit it on fire, which enflamed most of the rest of the room he was in on fire as well.
Last I checked, NASA was very good about making sure things on the ISS don’t catch fire. Seems weird that future-UEG-NASA would forego some of those basic safety concepts.
So, ultimately, not good.
I recommend this only in the context of ‘watch a familiar genre from an unfamiliar source,’ not because it’s actually any good.
The soundtrack is a mark in its favor though, so that’s nice.
This is absolutely an airplane movie.
For any other time, watch any of the other movies I mentioned throughout.
