Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
Before the MCU revealed its Endgame, the highest grossing of the movie wasn’t any American blockbuster or franchise. Instead, audiences across the globe flocked to see The Wandering Earth, a sci-fi action blockbuster from director Frank Gwo, starring Wu (Wolf Warrior) Jing.
In a not-too distant future, Earth finds itself jeopardized when the Sun begins to expand, threatening to consume the entire solar system within a hundred years. The people of Earth put aside their differences and form a single collective government, who develop a single, collective plan: Turn the planet into a spaceship and drive it to a new solar system.
Yes, this is the real plot of the movie. This is the first, like, five minutes.
The actual action of the film picks up 17 years into this plan, with society continuing along in underground shelters and astronauts in a guiding satellite driving the planet towards its new destination. But disaster strikes when the Earth gets caught in Jupiter’s heavy gravitational pull, and begins an inexorable slide towards the big red planet.
The fate of the human race rests in the hands of a single family. Aboard the satellite, Liu Peiqiang (Jing) races to counteract the AI’s salvage protocols, which would abandon Earth completely, while his abandoned, embittered son Liu Qi (Qu Chuxiao) and adopted daughter Han Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai) are enlisted in a desperate rescue mission to repair one of the Earth engines and get the planet moving again.
With its wild story and spectacular sci-fi imagery, The Wandering Earth was a massive success everywhere except for North America, where it barely registered in theaters. But thanks to Netflix, we can finally catch up with the rest of the world and see just where The Wandering Earth goes.
Next Week’s Pick:
Acclaimed as one of the last great action films of the 90’s, John Frankenheimer’s Ronin is cultishly adored thanks to its ice-cold, macho script (heavily rewritten by David Mamet, under a pseudonym), eclectic ensemble, and an instant-classic car chase.
Now available to stream on Amazon Prime, let’s take a ride with Ronin.
Would you like to be a guest in next week’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!
Our Guests
I want to like The Wandering Earth more than I did. It’s got the kind of hard sci-fi big idea that I love — to escape the Sun, the entire planet must be converted into a giant spaceship. But instead of exploring the real implications of that big idea most of the movie’s focus is on the interpersonal relationships of a few people — a family that gets drafted into an emergency mission to help save the planet. I have no problem with character-driven stories, but I didn’t see much in the way of real development for any of these characters — and outside of that core family the rest are barely even types. Add to that a subplot that was more or less lifted from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you end up with a film that just doesn’t really do much with what ought to be an interesting premise. Neither the sci-fi concepts nor the characters are developed enough for my liking, and thus the lengthy, protracted CGI sequences end up feeling pretty empty. It’s not the worst blockbuster disaster movie I’ve seen, but I think we can agree that’s a pretty a low bar. (@T_Lawson)
Brendan Agnew (The Norman Nerd):
Look, this is a movie where people have to fight Jupiter — as in, *the planet* — with lasers. If that doesn’t convince you it’s worth your time, I don’t know what to tell you.
Ok, so maybe you’re some kind of Hater Of Fun and the thought of a sci-fi disaster epic that combines Armageddon, Snowpiercer, WALL*E, and basically every destruction sequence ever filmed by Roland Emmerich somehow doesn’t immediately convince you. Maybe the existence of a Chinese film whose sheer scale and spectacle eats the lunch of most Hollywood mega-blockbusters doesn’t arouse your curiosity. Maybe you’ve already had your full of estranged fathers and bitter sons bonding over their worst and finest hours. Or perhaps the unexpected strength and inspiration of adopted sisters, the sacrifice of selfless strangers, and the collective idealistic will of a humanity united no longer moves you.
Maybe you’re a robot, I dunno.
But — and I really cannot stress this enough — this is a movie where the heroes FIGHT. JUPITER. WITH LASERS.
And even more insane than that is that the movie earns this absolutely impossible buy-in, partly by kicking off with the most “hold my beer” of physics-defying “save the world” scenarios, but also because it does the basic legwork of making you give a genuine shit about enough people involved, and making the small victories gained by heavy sacrifice worth it so you crave the bigger win. The movie is *ludicrous*, but the setup and payoff mechanics are solid, the characterization is fun, if sparse (Wu Jing is basically his Stoic Hero type from the Wolf Warrior films, but…with a beard this time), and for all the pastiches, the end result isn’t quite like anything you’ve seen before.
Also, did I mention they turn Earth into a rocket ship? (@BLCAgnew)
The Team
I need us, as a species, to be done with the “evil AI represented by glowing red eye” trope. You know for the first handful of decades after 2001: A Space Odyssey it was a kinda neat homage, oh look, they’re doing it in a Pixar movie, how fun. But it’s just about the most boring story element/homage possible and every time The Wandering Earth cuts away from the Earth and its…you know, its wanderings, in order to watch the A Time for Consequences guy battle the AI, I could feel my interest waning. That storyline ends up having a strong, emotional payoff but it’s mostly blandly spinning wheels to keep that character occupied before the big finish.
So, how’s the rest of the movie? I actually really, really dug it. The Wandering Earth at times does play like a mash-up of the last 25-ish years of popular sci-fi, but the combination they came up with is so totally up my alley that I couldn’t help but give myself over to it. I love the film’s commitment to its insane-yet-functional future world, a world where the apocalypse has already happened (a couple different ones, actually) yet people just keep right on being people. The film’s dedication to its big-hearted themes of endurance, hope, and human resilience reminded me of the similarly wide-eyed and sincere Pacific Rim. Like that film, Wandering Earth presents a vision that I dearly long to believe in, one where humanity, for all its squabbling and all its failings, gets its collective shit together, puts their heads down, and figures their way out of an impossible problem.
At times The Wandering Earth falls into disaster movie tropes that I don’t find especially compelling. Characters who have had maybe five lines of dialogue get killed off and it’s played as big dramatic tragedies. There was another time where, I must’ve blinked at the wrong time because suddenly a bunch of characters were trapped under debris and in mortal danger. But despite this, I found myself happily caught up in the world of The Wandering Earth, and I wouldn’t mind a return trip. (@theTrueBrendanF)
My favorite thing about The Wandering Earth, the blockbuster Chinese sci-fi epic about hitching rockets to the globe and turning it into a spaceship hurtling through space to avoid our own sun’s death, is that that premise ISN’T the craziest part of the movie. Indeed, fear not if that first sentence sounded spoilery, as anything I’ve already described occurs in the first few minutes of The Wandering Earth. This is indeed China’s response to the likes of Armageddon. A mega-budget, CGI-laden epic of the grandest proportions that isn’t afraid to tout a little bit of nationalism/propaganda along the way. Starring Wu Jing, star of the Wolf Warrior franchise which has broken out in China to become a record-shattering box office juggernaut much the way this film has, there’s more than a little heroism, ingenuity, global leadership, and self-sacrifice on the part of our Chinese heroes in this global/galactic tale. And frankly, I’m okay with that. America has been pumping our propaganda into the world via our movies for generations. What’s important is that The Wandering Earth does a solid job with the spectacle and with the character dynamics and even with the over the top bombast of it all. Fight your way through the first hour or so to be rewarded with the grandeur of the back-half of this movie, which offers some glorious visuals, human stakes, and absurd action set pieces Michael Bay would wish he’d thought of. (@Ed_Travis)
Next Week’s Pick: