China, please save us! And smile while you are saving us!
The sun is about to destroy Earth, so humans have made rocket engines capable of moving the earth to a hopefully safe place. But after an earthquake, the rocket engines stop, and the earth is about to collide with Jupiter. There is a group of Chinese who are trying to save humanity, so they will try to start the engines again. But not all of them will make it back.
The Wandering Earth is one of the biggest box-office hits of all time in China. One can call The Wandering Earth the Chinese answer to Armageddon. The Wandering Earth isn’t an awful movie. You could say that the Chinese have something going on if they learn to create better characters.
The soundtrack is good, and the visuals are mostly good too. But unfortunately, there is some CGI here that looks awful. Especially early in the movie when the brother and sister steal a CGI vehicle. It doesn’t look good at all.
This is a brain-dead popcorn movie. If you compare it to Armageddon, which I am a big fan of, it’s easy to see what The Wandering Earth lacks as a movie. It lacks good and different characters who all have their own special abilities and different personalities. The characters in The Wandering Earth are very similar, and the movie takes itself too seriously. A movie like this needs to create playful characters that can have fun, even if the mission is a live-or-die mission for humanity. There aren’t many such characters in The Wandering Earth. The movie is mostly serious all the time.
When some characters died in the movie, I felt nothing. I couldn’t tie an emotional bond to any of the characters when I didn’t feel they deserved it. As mentioned, they feel very similar, and the story of the son who’s angry with his father doesn’t work at all. It’s very light and empty storytelling we are witnessing when it comes to the family relationship in the movie that has cracked.
The Wandering Earth is a nice try to make a Chinese disaster movie. But there’s still a lot to work on here. And the Chinese must learn to stop making movies like this with a stick shoved up their asses. Just relax, don’t tighten the butthole too much and we will smile more when watching movies like The Wandering Earth!