The Wandering Earth II review: a sci-fi blockbuster takes a dark turn

To efficiently imitate the sort of mega-budget worldwide blockbuster most carefully related to Hollywood productions, filmmaker Frant Gwo actually went international. 2019’s The Wandering Earth, a sci-fi catastrophe journey that turned one in every of China’s biggest-ever box-office hits, takes place in a future world the place Earth has been implanted with thrust rockets and piloted out of orbit to keep away from a photo voltaic catastrophe. Astronauts should steer the spaceship-planet to a brand new dwelling, whereas the floor freezes and its diminished inhabitants huddle underground.

The movie’s huge scope helped the film turn out to be a Chinese language smash, although it fell in need of a worldwide phenomenon. (Within the U.S., it had a restricted theatrical run, then premiered on Netflix a number of months later.) Wandering Earth’s intensive, typically convoluted world-building, drawn from a brief story by The Three-Physique Downside creator Cixin Liu, left loads of room for a follow-up. However Gwo will need to have grown connected to the much less icy model of his dwelling planet, as a result of The Wandering Earth II, receiving a considerably wider U.S. launch alongside its Chinese language debut, is one thing even much less probably than a disaster-movie sequel: a disaster-movie prequel.

Set throughout a number of many years main as much as Earth’s launch out of orbit (enabled by 1000’s of fusion-powered engines across the globe), the prequel begins off with loads of its predecessor’s grab-bag maximalism. There’s a seemingly mad scientist extolling the virtues of a “digital you that may dwell endlessly” — an AI-based plan pitched as an alternate strategy to survive the approaching apocalypse. (It’s unclear, but it surely feels like the concept was to add everybody to a Matrix-esque digital world, and depart the precise one to fry.) Professional-digital terrorist teams assault an enormous house elevator, explosions and low-gravity fisticuffs erupt, and we be taught that 91% of Individuals oppose shifting Earth out of orbit as a result of they don’t suppose an issue 100 years away is price fixing. (“The world isn’t on the facet of the truth,” one official laments.)

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The sprawling outcomes initially really feel like a mashup of Don’t Look Up and Independence Day: Resurgence, however because the movie enters its second hour, then its third, it brings in much more acquainted bits and items of different motion pictures. (It runs 173 minutes, together with credit and a number of postscripts.) There’s a lot film in The Wandering Earth II, and so many disasters, countdowns, and chyrons to go round. The film might set a document for the sheer variety of subtitled areas, timelines, characters, and sometimes even {hardware}. The primary film’s astronaut, Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing) will get a backstory. So does one of many pc programs. The writing crew steals bits of Interstellar one second, and engages in parallel considering with Moonfall the subsequent. (“The moon disintegrates in 179 hours.”)

However maybe the goofiest factor about Wandering Earth II is how resolutely un-goofy a lot of it’s. There are moments of absurdity, however the movie is usually surprisingly grim, in a means that feels admirably formidable however questionably helpful. A lot of the film has a downbeat moon-gray palette, even in scenes that don’t happen on the moon. The saddest storyline it weaves throughout the many years is about Tu Hengyu (Andy Lau), a scientist grieving the lack of his spouse and daughter, satisfied he can fine-tune the digital echo of his younger baby right into a fuller AI consciousness. (Right here, there are thematic parallels with Yeon Sang-ho’s JUNG_E, a fleeter and extra manageable science fiction film premiering on Netflix proper as Wandering Earth II lumbers into theaters.)

The dead-family storyline isn’t the one compulsory pause for pathos, both. One other character should cope with his spouse’s imminent demise, since most cancers instances have spiked throughout the rise of harmful photo voltaic exercise. On the identical time, he’s attempting to safe one of many restricted tickets to an underground metropolis.

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In some ways, Gwo carries this heaviness with extra grace than the supposed masters of the fashionable kind. In contrast to Roland Emmerich (whose work the Wandering Earth sequence usually resembles) or Michael Bay (whose Armageddon looks like a part of this film’s DNA), Gwo isn’t afraid of quiet moments amid the bombast. He doesn’t nervously pack his motion pictures with goony comedian aid or shameless ploys for applause. A few of his imagery has an eerie, virtually mournful magnificence — much more so than the earlier film, which discovered some poetic imagery among the many chintzier-looking particular results.

But none of this retains exhaustion from setting in over the course of almost three hours. Precisely what number of countdowns to doable apocalypse can a film bear, particularly when the planet is demonstrably intact firstly of the subsequent film? The viewers is aware of Earth survives, which turns Wandering Earth II right into a torture machine for its new characters: The planet will preserve going, however these poor suckers can nonetheless get put by the wringer.

That clearly isn’t Gwo’s intention, and it’s exceptional that his three-hour Wandering Earth prequel is concurrently stranger and extra emotionally grounded than the sooner movie. But even at this size, even with eye-popping moments and plausible characters, some essential humanity feels lacking. Basic catastrophe motion pictures provide one thing much like the texture of a horror film: the phobia of annihilation and the catharsis of survival, however unfold over a bigger canvas. Perhaps that mannequin simply doesn’t work anymore. Skillfully made as it’s, Wandering Earth II feels extra like immersion remedy for the fashionable onslaught of apocalyptic information from all over the world. Like franchises, international disasters now not actually finish.

The Wandering Earth II opens in theaters on Sunday, Jan. 22, the primary day of the lunar new yr. Verify the film’s web site for areas.