Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: The Wandering Earth (2019)

This is topic The Wandering Earth (2019) in forum Film Handlers' Movie Reviews at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Mark Ogden (Member # 43) on 02-16-2019, 07:12 PM:

In Mandarin with English subtitles at the AMC Metreon Theaters, San Francisco, California.

*****

Some years from now, the residents of Earth realize that the planet is soon going to be vaporized by a Sun that’s expanding faster than anticipated. The solution is to (get this) build 10,000 rocket engines in the southern hemisphere and along the equator, which will blast us out of orbit and, 2500 years later, put us in Alpha Centauri near a better class of star. It all goes well for a while, but after seventeen years a series of earthquakes knocks out a bunch of the engines, causing the planet to go on a collision course with Jupiter. So it’s up to an intrepid band of teenagers . . .

This movie is being hyped as the first serious attempt by China to make a major science fiction epic (as opposed, I guess, to the first half-assed attempt by China to make a major science fiction epic). They certainly spent a bunch of yuans on it and it’s all there on the screen, the special effects are top notch, at least the equal of anything US studios are doing. But the movie . . . meh. The plot is so preposterous that it’s hard to get into from the get-go and it’s so fast and loud that it becomes unnerving, while the relentless shaky-cam photography doesn’t help either. The subtitles go by really fast as well, and they are in not particularly good English, so I missed a bit there. There’s a teeny bit of communist dogma mixed in with the dialog, but it goes by quick. It was interesting seeing the film with a predominately Chinese audience, scenes that I thought were deadly serious wound up getting gales of laughter. Go figure.

Didn’t love it or hate it, but it was a reasonable entertainment for two hours on a rainy afternoon.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 02-16-2019, 09:53 PM:

quote: Mark Ogden
build 10,000 rocket engines in the southern hemisphere and along the equator, which will blast us out of orbit

Futurama already did it.

Posted by Frank Cox (Member # 6258) on 02-16-2019, 10:51 PM:

Space 1999
Same idea with the moon. (A TV series that I quite enjoyed, actually.)