The Wandering Earth (2019) Review

One of China’s Highest Grossing Films Is Delightfully Bonkers

“Beijing No. 3 Transportation Division reminds you: Routes are countless. Safety is foremost. With unregulated driving, your loved ones might end up in tears.”

Michael Bay, Roland Emmerich, and Christopher Nolan all walked so Frant Gwo could run.

But seriously though, I am impressed that through borrowing elements from traditional Hollywood blockbusters like “Armageddon,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “2012,” and “Interstellar,” that China has finally successfully emulated the American blockbuster space.

This is currently the second highest grossing film in Chinese movie history, and if you’ve seen their highest grossing film, “Wolf Warrior 2,” it’d be easy to dismiss the burgeoning film market as making films that appeal to China and China only, with mostly low-budget try-hard affairs, that assumedly make money simply for the country’s lack of choice.

But with “The Wandering Earth,” I think the market can actually find success in emulating the time of stupid blockbusters Hollywood seems incapable of making at the moment. Make no mistake though, this isn’t high cinema, it’s a interstellar disaster film that finds success through insanity, with all the heroic sacrifices and scenes of a united humanity you’d expect from this type of movie.

Now if you’d like to stay clear of spoilers, go on Netflix, turn off the dubs, turn on the subs, and watch it. Otherwise I have to get out how giddy this film’s bonkers plot made me.

Alright, so sometime after the 2044 Olympics, Earth has been ravaged by Global Warming, creating worse and worse disasters, including volcanos which have ravaged South Carolina. That’s right, volcanoes in South Carolina. On the positive side, Siberia is fertile farm land now.

To make matters worse though, we discover the sun is dying, and the solar system will become uninhabitable in three hundred years. The Earth’s solution? Build ten thousand strategically placed thrusters, and move the Earth in a multi-millennia journey to another solar system. All of this is explained, our main characters are introduced briefly, and we’re only to minute seven. At this point I was FULLY onboard to what this film was doing. If you’re not, it only gets crazier from here.

Seventeen years later and humanity lives in ten thousand underground cities near the thrusters, only going to the -119 below Fahrenheit temperature surface to mine the literal mountains of Earth, to feed the thrusters. But the Earth doesn’t even make it past Jupiter before the gravity of Jupiter starts pulling the Earth in, shutting down all the thrusters, causing devastating earthquakes, with the eventuality that the Earth will be destroyed when it’s pulled into the the infamously big Gas Giant. And things go from bad to worse when an evil AI and the world government tries to abandon the Earth, so the International Space Station can go on ahead to repopulate humanity.

After the world government announces the Earth is fucked, and they’re abandoning it to be sucked up by Jupiter, the main characters we’ve been following come up with a crazy idea. Jupiter is made of gas, right? So what if they ignited the planet of Jupiter, and the resulting explosion would push the Earth out of the gravitational field. It’s at this point that I started losing my my goddamn mind. Igniting the planet of Jupiter? Fuck yeah, movie! That’s batshit crazy!

So they do that, and it’s all great, besides the fact the explosive force pushing the Earth absolutely obliterates the surface of half the planet. But it all works out in the end. Humanity unites. Families come together. Characters sacrifice themselves heroically. It’s great. It’s like the best movie Roland Emmerich never made. The idea of moving the Earth with thrusters is insane enough. But then characters solve a problem by igniting the planet of Jupiter? I mean, come on. What more could you want?

4/5 Stars

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