The Wandering Earth

The Chinese mega-blockbuster The Wandering Earth is said to be the second most popular film in human history.  Probably, when all receipts are collected, the science fiction epic, will be accounted the movie seen on the big screen by the most people in all of the history of cinema.  Based on a notable science fiction novel, a part of The Three Body Problem books by ... (admired by no less than Barack Obama), the picture has a distinguished pedigree.  It's fantastically grandiose but incoherent to such an extent that one suspects that the Netflix streaming version of the epic, perhaps, preserves only about half of the movie.  Whether this is true, I don't know. 

Even severely edited, the film, after its novelty wears off, becomes rapidly tedious.  This is due to the fact that we can't ever tell what is happening or why, confusion aggravated by the fact that, with few exceptions, we don't have much clue as to the characters (or even identities) of the various heroes and heroines expiring spectacularly on-screen.  It's pretty clear that the director can manage a zoom shot that begins with a glint in the eye of a character, passes through buildings and walls and monstrous machines, then, rises over what's left of the frozen earth's atmosphere, climbing into outer space, and, then the intergalactic void, all of this accomplished in a single take that is about 30 seconds long, but has no idea at all how to film a simple conversation between two actors.  I've never seen a film so technically accomplished in its special effects, Bladerunner-style urban environments, and gut-churning anti-gravity scenes, that is so completely botched in all other  respects.  Most of the action comes down to a guy in a space suit hammering on jammed door with a wrench. 

The plot moves with lightning speed.  In the first minutes, we're told that the sun is about to explode and that "monster tsunamis" have wiped out half the population.  The survivors have been forced into underground cities about 5 km below the earth's surface -- these places look like a combination of an urban mall with the streets of neo LA in Blade Runner, all kiosks and brightly lit booths and flickering neon signs.  To escape the blunderbuss of the exploding sun, the earth has been equipped with 1500 giant blue propulsion jets -- these huge jets fire incessantly operating off some kind of nuclear fuel in "reactor cores."  The jets propel the earth across the Solar System and toward a friendly planetary system where human beings plan to take up residence after a 2500 hundred year flight -- nine-hundred years of acceleration, nine-hundred years of cruising, and 700 years to decelerate into a earth-like orbit around a distant sun.  Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry -- the earth which is relying on Jupiter's gravitational field for an additional boost is off-target and, venturing too close to the massive gaseous planet, will be torn apart by its influence.  There's a vestigial backstory about a teenage boy who is mad at his astronaut father -- the boy's father is an astronaut on a huge rotary space station that is shadowing the earth on its voyage for completely inscrutable reasons.  (A sort of explanation is given late in the film.)  The boy skips school and sneaks to the earth's frozen surface -- it's a vast glacier -- and, with his kid sister, gets caught in titanic earthquakes as Jupiter's tidal forces begin to literally pull the earth apart.  Some more heroes surface and the kid with his colleagues drives their giant snow-rover, a big mining truck qua snowplow, down to Sulawesi where they are supposed to replace a failed reactor core.  At Sulawesi, the kid contrives a plan to light Jupiter on fire using a huge jet torch and employ the consequent blast (Jupiter being mostly inflammable hydrogen) to propel the "wandering Earth" back on course.  When the flame from the jet falls short of Jupiter, which is pulling earth's matter into the vortex of its great red eye, the kid's father on the space station bridges the gap by sacrificing himself (and the Helios Project) in a huge self-inflicted explosion that amplifies the jet from the earth and puts the match to Jupiter.  As anticipated by the teenage hero, the massive planet blows up and blasts the Earth back on its 2500 year voyage.  The film ends inexplicably with a sequence just reprising shot for shot an early sequence in which the hero "hot-wires" and steals a massive snow-rover which he doesn't really know how to drive. 

I've left out about an hour of earthquakes and explosions. Jupiter's gravity turns the earth's surface into a turbulent ocean of cracking and lunging ice.  Periodically, the characters shoot through ravines full of deadly snapping rocks, a bit like the navigation of the fissure in the Death Star in the first Star Wars movie.  Sometimes, they go underground into giant shafts where they fall or are endangered by meteorite-like shards of ice and boulders about the size of train locomotives.  Each individual shot or vista is impressive, but, ultimately, they don't add up to anything at all.  In the film's climax, daddy astronaut is working to blow himself up as his enormous Ferris-wheel shaped space station fragments into fiery pieces.  Down on earth, everything is being sucked into the sky by Jupiter's gravitational field.  In some kind of hole, two lads are trying to do something to some kind of machine -- this involves hammering and mighty feats of strength.  Nearby, about 12 heroes are shoving on something as hard as they can -- they are really putting their shoulders up against some sort of obstacle (maybe, it's a door they are trying to keep closed against some enigmatic force).  In any event, a little girl, who has been skewered with iron re-rod, broadcasts a call for help.  All of the snow-rovers are frantically driving home so people can say goodbye to their families before the earth blows up.  But the snow-rover drivers heed the child's call and make about 5000 u-turns on the crumbling glacier, drive back to the Sulawesi jet, and, there, hopping out of their monster snow-plows, run into some vast shaft to help the 12 heroes who are pushing heroically on whatever it is that they pushing heroically against.  There are too many people to put their hands on the surface that, for some reason, has to be pushed and so they push on the backs of others who push on the backs of yet others who push against the backs of the dozen heroes who are pushing on whatever it is they have to push against.  It's completely idiotic.  But whatever has to be pushed gets good and pushed and the earth is saved -- although at the expense of the Helios Project.   The Helios Project is a post-human library of all known DNA designed to seed the universe with people and animals and insects from earth in the event that the Wandering Planet gets destroyed -- this is why the Earth is shadowed by the giant space station.  Of course, the Helios Project is supervised by a HAL-like computer intelligence who is not at all amused when the hero-astronaut (the surly boy-hero's father) decides to blow up the repository of all future generations.  But the hero-astronaut does something to something else to induce a mighty explosion, destroys the Helios project and its uncooperative robot sentinel, and, then, pilots his space station with 300,000 kilotons of nuclear fuel into Jupiter to help his son blow up the colorful Gas Giant.  (Given the level of stupidity in the human characters, I found myself rooting for the computer and the Helios Project.)

There's no acting in this movie.  No dialogue worth repeating or, even, hearing -- the film is hideously dubbed and, probably, best watched with the sound muted.  People posture, declaim defiance or express hope, and, then, they die.  It doesn't matter half the population perished before the movie began and, I think, another third of the survivors were eliminated when they were forbidden to enter the underground cities, freezing to death on the icy surface of the earth that is now nothing more than a huge sepulcher.  In the cosmic scheme of things, life is cheap, although this film is not.