The Wandering Earth

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🎙️ EPISODE 403: 02.17.22 First of all, and I have no idea if this because of some creative (bad), free-wheeling in the Chinese-to-English translation department, but "Wandering" is perhaps the exact opposite adjective they are looking for here. The damn earth is not wandering! See, the plot entails turning the earth into a spaceship (essentially) because, in 2061, the aging sun (that bitch-ass old man sun) is about to turn into a red giant and threatens to engulf the earth's orbit within 100 years, forcing nations to consolidate into the United Earth Government (The UEG, definitely not just "China" rebranded for world domination 😬), and the subsequently named Wandering Earth Project, whose goal is to "migrate" the earth out of the solar system and into the Alpha Centauri system using 12,000 enormous fusion-powered "Earth Engines" built across the Northern Hemisphere with further Torque Engines along the equator to propel the entirety of planet Earth.

Got it? They literally want this thing to travel on more or less a straight line and definitely not crash into any planets, for example let's say Jupiter. Pretty big planet. Ever heard of it?

But they flub up and this thing (the planet earth) is on a collision course with — you guessed it — Jupiter! And that's more or less the entire movie: we have to avoid crashing the earth (which is a spaceship now) into Jupiter because we are fleeing our solar system because of this aging sun situation and definitely not because of any manmade climate related event(s). Look, suns (stars) are gonna expand and transition into red giants. That's their right. Who are we to say what a sun (star) can or cannot be?

So this movie, which quickly became one of the biggest Chinese hits all the way back in 2019, only to be supplanted by several other large-scale action/war/etc films released right after it...


...this is a bad movie and bad in the way I imagine most of the Marvel movies are bad because the CGI — which is an unrelenting constant — looks like a dumb cartoon. In this case, I admit it's probably worse because the CGI is mostly only depicting trucks driving around on the ice-covered surface of the wayward spaceship earth and not superheroes flying around slapping each other or whatever the hell happens in those movies. This is, of course, not quite as bad as the obligatory emotional drama, inserted here as a father-son thing (sons hate when their fathers euthanize their mothers it turns out, even during the apocalypse).

Listen. This movie is not very good. It's boring and feels like it was made by A.I.. It also has some weird subtext about China and China's global ambitions, maybe. I don't know. I'm not that smart. It's hard enough reviewing movies on their own without considering the greater geopolitical impact of them. Stream it on Netflix (US) today!

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 402 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 404 ⫸

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The Wandering Earth (Chinese: 流浪地球) is a 2019 Chinese science fiction film directed by Frant Gwo, loosely based on the 2000 novella The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin. The film stars Qu Chuxiao, Li Guangjie, Ng Man-tat, Zhao Jinmai, Wu Jing and Qu Jingjing. Set in the far future, it follows a group of astronauts and rescue workers guiding the Earth away from an expanding Sun, while attempting to prevent a collision with Jupiter. The film was theatrically released in China on 5 February 2019 (Chinese New Year's Day), by China Film Group Corporation.