Liu lang di qiu (2019)'s comments

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Xondar

This movie is terrible.

4 years 9 months ago

slickmezzie

So much potential but the dialogue was terrible (cringe worthy in parts). I am sure the book is much, much better.

4 years 1 month ago

The Chinese blockbuster that launched a franchise, The Wandering Earth is one of those dumb, brash sci-fi disaster movies that do well financially in the West, but only very rarely critically. You know the ones, don't force me to name names. Having been based on a novel by Cixin Liu is one of its saving graces, because there's a lot of world building. Essentially, the sun is about to expand and humanity has put engines on the planet Earth to escape Armageddon, on what is going to be a 2,500-year multi-generational trip to another star system. It sounds insane, but it's pretty well-realized. Having to slingshot off Jupiter creates a first crisis as engines fail and the planet starts getting drawn into the gas giant, and workers mobilize to fix them before it's too late, including the kids of a man working on a space station that follows Earth around and who may have the key to their salvation... if the computer system doesn't pull a HAL 2000 in the middle of it all. So there's a LOT happening, and during some of the action scenes in the middle, my eyes were sort of glazing over. I needed a break where they did more with the characters. These are thinly-drawn, but I still felt their deaths and triumphs. The Wandering earth is wall-to-wall CG and sometimes proves to be over-ambitious and starts to look like a video game, but for the most part, it stands up fine. Chinese cinema has always been behind on these kinds of effects, but it doesn't prevent its movies from going for broke. As with the premise, it's all overblown, and there's a certain joy in that, but restraint would have made things matter more.

8 months 2 weeks ago