j* Movie Reviews 2019

Wandering Earth (2019)

This may be one of the more expensive movies made, but it sure does wander... a lot, into places where I stopped caring.

So this film apparently cost $700million to make and is a Chinese sci-fi, by all reports dropped on Netflix with a distinct lack of fanfare. It's based on a novel, and maybe if you're familiar with the novel it would be more coherent.

I was totally stoked that finally someone was tapping my *big issue*... the thing I think humanity needs to be working towards. The exploding sun. That's right, this film sets its motivation at the need for humans to escape the expanding sun. For whatever obscure space-fantasy reason, they decide to do this by fitting massive rocket-engines to the Earth and just driving it out of the solar system. Yeah. Because that seems more feasible than colonising another planet. To be fair to this, they do note a lot of catastrophic consequences that come out of this action.

So there's a Dad who is an astronaut on the space station/Earth navigation system. His son who grows up in an underground Earth base the GrandDad and a daughter whose existence is finally explained. The son and daughter set out on some surface mission that if I knew what it was I have now forgotten. But they're driving a big truck across the surface of the frozen Earth. The Earth is currently near Jupiter on its way out of the solar system. Because of course it is.

Anyway then there's this glitch in something that may or may not be explained adequately by Jupiter's gravity, and then all the rocket boosters of Earth stop and it's going to be sucked into the doom of Jupiter. So the kids and gramps have to save the Earth by getting some special rocket ignition object (it's a big sphere) to an equatorial Earth engine.

In a lot of sci-fi I can be quite "well that wouldn't happen" and "that's not scientifically plausible" but in this I was kind of "I have never considered this issue because it is so far fetched and thus I can have no real informed opinion about this." And if the movie had more impact on my life I might have gone and found the Movie-science breakdown. Would Jupiter suck Earth's atmosphere away as it was passing (stupidly) close whilst exiting the Solar System powered by giant rocket engines that "burn rocks?" I don't know. And I don't care.

In fact, I found myself not caring about much for a lot of this movie. It is freaking spectacular to look at. The sets, the costumes, the cgi, all are amazeballs. And it's a disaster film so there's just stuff crashing and falling and smashing and killing people all over the show - never ending parade of disaster. But it started to feel a bit Geostorm to me. I never did connect to the characters. Whilst I loved the premise of taking action in the face of the exploding sun, I just didn't find the story got me in. Apart from that one scene where the Dad traces Jupiter on his space station window.... That gave me all the goosebumps.

J* gives it 2 stars.