Liu Cixin is one of China’s most prolific and respected writers of science fiction, winning the prestigious Hugo Award for his 2015 novel The Three-body Problem and no fewer than nine Galaxy Awards, China’s own, equally prestigious, literary science fiction award. His 2000 novella The Wandering Earth was adapted for film by Frant Gwo and became a huge international hit, becoming China’s second highest-grossing film of all time and, as of late summer 2109, was the seventh highest-grossing film worldwide of the year before finding a home on Netflix. Despite its popularity and over-the-top plotting, it’s a curiously underwhelming film with virtually nothing about it marking it as particularly Chinese.
In the year 2061, scientists determine that the Sun is dying, expanding into a red giant that will destroy the Earth within 300 years. A United Earth Government is formed to meet the challenge and comes up with an audacious plan – to move the Earth using a network of huge engines to Alpha Centauri before the Sun consumes it. The human race retreats underground as the environment collapses following a deliberate slowing of the rotation of the planet, plunging the world int o a bitter ice age and a space station is built to act as a navigator for the Earth’s long journey.But as the planet passes Jupiter, a “gravitational spike” triggers devastating earthquakes that damage many of the colossal fusion engines and an even more outrageous plot is hatched – to detonate Jupiter hydrogen heavy atmosphere and use the resulting explosion to blast the Earth out of the Solar System.
Big on ideas – many of them woefully thought through it must be said – The Wandering Earth is undeniably ambitious but ultimately unfulfilling. It looks fantastic, as you might expect from a film that cost around $50 million, but it’s hollow, ill-conceived and over-long. It’s the Chinese equivalent of those visually pleasing but empty-headed Roland Emmerich and/or Dean Devlin disaster films (Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009), Geostorm (2017), chock full of gorgeous imagery but dim witted, prone to episodic bursts of action (much of it highly contrived) and annoyingly naive.
Not everyone watches a science fiction film expecting it to strictly adhere to scientific accuracy and nor indeed should they. But when a film is as willfully scientifically illiterate as The Wandering Earth one can’t help but be distracted by its many idiocies. The plot would shame even the most reckless and gung-ho of pulp science fiction writers – the notion of turning the Earth into a spaceship had already been tried out by the Daleks in the Doctor Who serial The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) and Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999 (1975-1977) had sent the moon wandering through the universe in a series as clueless about basic physics as The Wandering Earth. There are no fewer than eight screenwriters credited on The Wandering Earth – Dongxu Yan, Frant Gwo, Geer Gong, Junce Ye, Ruchang Ye, J.J. Shen, Ti Wu and Zhixue Yang – and it might not be too much to expect that at least one of them had said at some point, “hang on – none of this makes any sense!” Clearly none of them understands what impact the slowing the Earth’s rotation would have beyond transforming the planet into an ice wasteland and the nonsense about blowing up Jupiter – a development not found in the original story – simply beggars belief. The science is so terrible that the film comes across more as fantasy than as proper science fiction.
But it’s not just the bad science that’s aggravating. The characters – and there’s a huge, multi-generational cast on display here – are entirely stock, the dialogue often little more than simple-minded platitudes (“death is normal”) and the string of disasters that the various scientists and astronauts have to contend with feel horribly contrived. Characters get themselves into all sorts of scrapes simply because the script demands more spectacle, including a disintegrating space station, a pointless ascent up a huge elevator shaft and a hazardous journey through a collapsing ravine, none of which adds anything to the actual story but gives the extraordinary number of effects houses involved something to do.
Given how much is going on, The Wandering Earth still somehow manages to feel terribly dull. There’s a lot of rushing about, shouting and escaping but time just drags on and it’s hard not to stop the attention from drifting after the first half hour. None of the characters are particularly interesting, nothing about the film feels particularly Chinese – it could just as easily have been made in Hollywood with no changes made to the script at all – and the wonky science simply makes no sense whatsoever. Its huge global success must be down to its spectacle which is undeniable but a few decent characters and some thoughtful ideas wouldn’t have gone amiss.
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