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[opinionsandfeelings]

The Wandering Earth Review

My rating: 4.5/5

Best quote: Let’s light Jupiter up.

Man, what a fantastic film.

Here’s the setup: our sun is expanding and within a hundred years it’s going to swallow the whole solar system. Earth’s global community somehow puts its differences behind them and comes up with a comprehensive plan move, MOVE, the earth from its current orbit to another system. This comes in the form of giant rockets propelling earth from orbit and everyone living in underground cities to compensate the ecological effects of said move. Ambitious AF this movie is.

So we’re introduced to our main characters, the handsome Liu Qi and his sidekick kid sister Han Duoduo. Mm, Liu Qi’s actor, Qu Chuxiao, is beautiful and I hope he’s in many more films. I digress.

Liu Qi is apparently a genius, he seems more like a moody teenage protagonist than anything at the beginning but calls himself a ‘genius’ enough you get the idea it’s probably mentioned for a reason. Kid sister on the other hand is basically there for cute support, I don’t consider that a bad thing since it helps humanize the cast.

Mr. Genius and his sidekick live with their grandpa in underground Beijing since their dad is an important astronaut on the global space station (in this universe there’s a United Global Government but countries still, I think, have some sort of autonomy? Film didn’t get much into that but everyone’s got a state flag on their uniforms). Genius decides to steal his grandpa’s vehicle pass and since kid sister wants to see the earth’s surface she comes with.

Genius is not the best at driving grandpa’s rig but he manages and they head out, kid sister’s amazed by all the ice and snow aaaand then they’re arrested for stealing a rig. They meet Tim in jail, a white chinese native. There’s a reason for this person, he literally does nothing useful but you’ll see why he’s there as they go along.

Grandpa’s called, he comes and gets the kids but in a convenient twist there’s a massive earthquake that breaks open their jail cell. Out of pity/human duty Liu Qi frees Tim and they hustle out of there and back to there rig where grandpa hauls ass back toward home.

At this time time we learn a bit about Liu Qi’s dad who is up in the space station observing all this and also learning that, as they’re passing Jupiter, there’s a very real chance Jupiter’s gravitational pull will drag earth in and bam, we’re all dead. Hey guess what, it’s happening!

Back on earth Team Get-Home-Now is accosted by the military because, for some reason, the grandpa is the best driver they could think of and they need him to deliver a ‘lighter cord’ which is what will relight Beijing’s rocket. When the earthquake happened it knocked out basically majority of the earth’s rockets and that isn’t helping the Jupiter situation. The Military, and all it’s counterparts around the world, are all trying to get these fuses to said rockets ASAP. “Why aren’t they stored right next to each thruster?” is a question I would say you’re not going to get an answer to so, don’t worry about it.

Team Military and Team Get-Home don’t particularly enjoy each other’s company but do their best to get the lighter cord to the nearest rocket. This involves driving rigs through an icy canyon of Shanghai which is definitely not a good idea. They barely make it through but grandpa dies in the process. Liu Qi and Han Duoduo are understandably upset. In grandpa’s final flashback we learn money is evil and he adopted Han Duoduo who was orphaned around the time Shanghai was swallowed by massive tsunamis (see consequences of stopping earth’s orbit).

Up at the space station everyone’s been forced into hibernation to save energy but Liu Qi’s dad thinks something’s wrong and breaks out of his hibernation chamber. The rest of his part basically deals with him battling an out of control space station AI and showing how friendly China and Russia are. Honestly, it works and I wish more propaganda was handled in this fashion. More on that later.

Back on earth Liu Qi and Duoduo (and Tim, yes Tim’s still there) head off on their own because um, Team Military basically helped kill grandpa. They end up tracking down a rig that sent out a distress call and it turns out it was another military team taking their own lighter cord to another rocket. Their rig crashed during the earthquake and only one person survived, the resident genius thankfully. Team Get-Home hop on board and decide to swing back to the military team.

Whoo boy, Team Military had a moment once Team Get-Home left. They’re fighting amongst themselves about the lighter cord and one of them, the girl of course, shoots the lighter cord dead because, in her words, ‘no more deaths’. Aka, she’s certain this cord is doing more damage than not. Everyone’s at their wit’s end about what to do.

Then Liu Qi shows up with a rig, they hash it out and mash into one super team. I’ll call them the Team Danger. Team Danger has to get the last lighter cord to the nearest rocket and now, but, word gets out that the rocket has had a meltdown and the entire city beneath it is gone, as is the rocket. It looks like a volcano. Team Danger doesn’t give up hope yet tho, they just change their destination to the Philippines because there’s a rocket base there that still needs a lighter cord. Cool!

They head there and fuel up at a supply station near Sulewasi (the base in the Philippines) and learn a few things: One, most rockets have already been turned back on (great!) but two, earth is definitely about to crash into Jupiter so hug your loved ones and say goodnight, no one apparently has hope anymore. In this moment there’s a lovely scene with Liu Qi, pissed off, looking up to the sky and seeing Jupiter’s looming presence. He hones in on the planet’s famous ‘eye’, a massive eternal storm, and has his genius moment: if we shoot into Jupiter’s atmosphere we can cause an explosion that will propel us away from Jupiter! I’m not a scientist but the idea sounds alright. I mean, it’s the end of the freaking world, let’s try any and all options.

Team Danger hashes out the logistics: they’ll still head to Sulewasi and use that rocket as their weapon, turn off the rocket to do some manual overrides, shove the lighter cord in and see what happens.

They get to Sulewasi and while everyone else is sad it’s the end of the world Team Danger is rushing in put their plan into motion. Han Duoduo gets on the global broadcast asking for help but nobody is listening, Liu Qi and Tim drive into the rocket’s reactor to deliver the lighter cord, Team Military is using all their manpower to pull the reactor’s ‘pin’ (but failing), and the rest are busy downloading new override commands. Liu Qi can’t get the reactor to open and take the cord, the override commands aren’t working, everything is at a halt. Another earthquake happens causing even more panic.

At a loss Han Duoduo calls the space station and reaches the only person on board not in hibernation—Liu Qi’s dad. She tells him the plan, he tells the United World Government and they’re like “yeah no, we already thought of this plan and it’s not gonna work”. He’s like *sigh*  “it’s the end of the world, we have to try something” and government still won’t budge, but it does say they’ll broadcast Duoduo’s message. So, a tearful Duoduo pleads out to the world for help and wouldn’t you know it, helps finally arrives from all walks of life. See? She is the humanity piece of Team Danger.

Team Military receives help and can pull the pin, Liu Qi manages to unstick the reactor, Tim pulls him out just in time before he’s crushed, and the rest of Team Danger manages to load the override system. Everything’s shoved into motion, the rocket blasts out at Jupiter aaaand….

Is a couple thousand kilometers short of it’s target. So basically they just wasted all that time and effort to shoot at Jupiter and nothing’s happening. Up in the space station Liu Qi’s dad realizes there’s over a hundred thousand tons of fuel on board, detaches the fuel holding part from the rest of the station and dives head in to the storm. He and Liu Qi have a heartfelt conversation and he sacrifices himself for the greater good of humanity.

Surprisingly, this works. The beam from both the rockets and the space station exploding are enough to react with Jupiter’s atmosphere and cause a massive, I mean MASSIVE, explosion that propels a shockwave  back toward earth. Everyone scrambles to hide underground, Liu Qi and his sister (and Tim) don’t quite make it but survive when the blast hits thanks to some handy tools.

Cut to three years later where things are just about the same as the beginning of the movie except Liu Qi is now a real driver, not just a moody kid, his sister is his driving partner, and one of the guys from the Military team is their new third wheel BFF. Tim and everyone else is seen living out their lives both in the underground city and above ground and it looks like we’re going to survive after all. The Wandering Earth plan is repeated and you have hope that maybe, just maybe, after a hundred generations the earth will settle at its new location.

First thought though: pretty sure we’ll run out of fuel before that happens, just from what we see of the rocket at Beijing it’s like they’re mining the majority of the earth around them just to keep it running. If there are thousands of these rockets and they all need that much earth to be powered, my assumption is we’d scrape the earth all the way down to it’s core before actually making it to our destination. Despite that, maybe along the way we’d come up with better ideas along the way?

Second thought: this film is produced, directed, and financed from China/Chinese backed companies. There’s nothing wrong with this, but I just find it interesting since it does it’s own propaganda in very different ways from what you would find in a US-backed project. While it’s very Chinese-centric it still portrays the whole world as working together and in doing so still manages to push a lot of diversity into its background plots. I highly appreciate that.

Beyond that, there’s never a point in the film where a single person carries the entire plot. The story only works with teamwork as its core value, everyone has to pitch in or else the world’s fucked. The only time it comes close to doing so is when Liu Qi’s dad flies into the beam to Jupiter. He only manages to do this however by killing the station’s AI and can only do this with help from his Russian friend on board who died in the process of figuring out what was going on with the hibernation. No one is a single hero, everyone is. That’s propaganda in itself but it’s also true: one single person is not enough to do everything.

Then there’s Tim. Why is Tim in this movie? At first I assumed he was the token white guy to appeal to an abroad audience but you begin to see through the film he serves two purposes: one, yes, to appeal to the abroad audience, but also to further that Teamwork-is-Everything point. He’s totally useless on his own but he never once abandons the team. Furthermore, he does add diversity to the team.

Overall I greatly enjoyed the film. I thought it was very unique and had many actually plausible ideas and concepts in terms of the whole Wandering Earth project. Again, I’m not a scientist but some of the ideas seemed at least reasonable. What did make me sad however is I’m very, very sure none of this would ever happen. No, not the part about the sun expanding and such, that part’s true and it will happen in several million years (very slowly, don’t worry). The sun’s expansion parallels with a lot of issues that surround climate change to explain why earth had to move. What’s unrealistic however, in my opinion, is the fact that the entire world decided to work together to actually pull this project off.

Maybe I’m cynical but you can’t convince me at this point that the human race didn’t just spend over a thousand years grouping themselves off and hating anyone that wasn’t part of their own group , only to suddenly change their minds when faced with the threat of total extinction. Do I wish that would be the case and everyone would set aside their manufactured differences? Hell yes, my hope would be to be proven wrong and see everyone suddenly working together for the race to save our own planet.

But…I mean, we can’t even slow climate change. We’ve known about climate change for over a hundred years and have done, essentially, nothing to curb it. Instead we’ve decided to be in denial and focus more on becoming nationalistic entities that would like to point out our differences more than point out the million more things in common.

So, I very badly wish The Wandering Earth universe existed in our own, maybe not the Wandering part, but the part where people would get along enough for a common cause to do what’s necessary to survive, not just for ourselves but for our planet and the other billions of organisms that live here.

To conclude, again, I loved this film. It made me cry several times and was so worth seeing. It has a lot of fantastical ideas and executes them on screen very well. Would recommend to anyone who likes sci-fi stuff, apocalyptic stuff, or just action/adventure in general.

Also, Qu Chuxiao is pretty handsome. He (and his dad, who’s actor is Wu Jing) are solid hunks. That’s just me though :)