Time: 125 Minutes
Cast:
Qu Chuxiao as Liu Qi
Li Guangjie as Captain Wang Lei
Ng Man-tat as Han Zi’ang
Zhao Jinmai as Han Duoduo
Wu Jing as Liu Peiqiang
Director: Frant Gwo

When the sun dies out, the people of Earth build giant thrursters to move the planet out of orbit and sail to a new star system. After 2,500 years, young people continue the fight for everyone’s survival.

I heard about The Wandering Earth for a little while, mainly about it being one of China’s all time biggest movies. Aside from that, all I knew about it was that it involved science fiction. It was briefly shown at cinemas near me but I missed it. Instead it was eventually released on Netflix, so I finally got to see it for myself more recently on there. I can certainly appreciate why it’s such a big deal, however the end product is simply just enjoyable and okay.

Before I go into the review, I should mention that I watched the dubbed version, normally I wouldn’t do this when it comes to foreign movies, but it wasn’t exactly my decision to make. It’s based on a short story of the same name, I never read it so I can’t really talk about how it compares. There’s no denying that this movie is very ambitious, and the people working on the movie have clearly thought a lot about the world in this story and established how the Earth operates during that point in time. As a result though, they are forced to have a ton of exposition dumps explaining things, most prominently towards the beginning when the narrator talks about everything that’s happened between now and then. The thing is I can’t say that they should’ve cut out the narration and explaining of everything that is happening, because all this information needs to be known to the audience. There’s just way too much to process within that 2 hour runtime that at a point I just went with wherever the plot went. Maybe if it was as a mini series it might’ve worked better. I wasn’t really invested in the story, and by the halfway point I just grew tired of everything, mainly the plot and characters. At that point I was watching for the visuals. This movie is ridiculously over the top and doesn’t really make sense, and you should probably know that going in. It’s not China’s Interstellar or Gravity, think more their Geostorm (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Again, I watched the dubbed version of the movie so it wasn’t the actors’ voices I heard, but they are fine enough in the roles I think. My issues is more to do with the characters. There are just so many to keep track of, you really only remember some, and really none of them go through any kind of change. I guess the actors do well enough in their roles to make it work fine, but there weren’t really standouts, they were just okay.

The direction by Frant Gwo is generally good. The special effects are the big selling point and for good reason. The production design is good and a lot of the visuals are good, but they at times delve into video game graphics. Still it manages to present things on such a large scale, and the CGI is good enough that it’s perfectly watchable. I’m not too familiar with how big budget sci-fi movies are in China, but if it’s really the biggest then good for them, even if again it’s their own version of Geostorm.

This movie is a big deal for China, and for good reason. Beyond that fact and the visuals however, I’m not sure there’s much to say about this movie. Although it is very ambitious and is really trying, it’s overstuffed, a little clichéd, and difficult to really get invested in. However it’s not bad by any means and it’s even pretty good at points. It’s now on Netflix, so if you’re the least bit curious about it and have a couple hours to spare, then I’d say check it out.