The Wandering Earth (2019)
Directed by Frant Gwo
When the Sun begins to expand in such a way that it will inevitably engulf and destroy the Earth in a hundred years, united mankind finds a way to avoid extinction by propelling the planet out of the Solar System using gigantic engines, moving it to a new home located four light years away, an epic journey that will last thousands of years.
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7 films that influenced The Wandering Earth
What critics say influenced The Wandering Earth
This curiously apolitical sci-fi extravaganza combines the garish plastic delirium of the “Monster Hunt” franchise with the men-on-a-mission bombast of “Armageddon;” it’s as unrelenting as “Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back,” and as bone dumb as “Geostorm” or “The Core.”
This soon gives way to Hollywood-style genre shenanigans, with the film borrowing (very) liberally from a long list of films including Armageddon , Sunshine , The Day After Tomorrow , 2012 , 2001: A Space Odyssey and many, many others, in some cases lifting whole sequences outright.
A hyperactive hybrid of doomsday films ranging from ’50s classic “When Worlds Collide” to Michael Bay’s bombastic “Armageddon” and, most notably, Ishiro Honda’s 1962 Japanese space opera “Gorath,” “The Wandering Earth” is perhaps most striking for its lack of nationalism and propaganda.
The group of workers — and the two rebellious teens who get caught up in the crisis — are straight out of disaster thrillers like Armageddon or The Core : gritty archetypes who get a few cool lines of dialogues or an impressive action sequence before dying one by one.
From start to finish, you will notice plot points from Interstellar , Gravity , 2001: A Space Odyssey, Armageddon , and every Roland Emmerich disaster movie ever.
The Core, Deep Impact, and to an unavoidable extent, Armageddon, are all influences on this eco-disaster pic.
Production designer Gao Ang has created an expansive wasteland which recalls The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Snowpiercer (2013), but exerts its own prophetic power.
This soon gives way to Hollywood-style genre shenanigans, with the film borrowing (very) liberally from a long list of films including Armageddon , Sunshine , The Day After Tomorrow , 2012 , 2001: A Space Odyssey and many, many others, in some cases lifting whole sequences outright.
And while the constant attempts to flee the destructive power of changing weather have their own echoes in past films, from The Day After Tomorrow to 2012 , Gwo mostly keeps the action tight and propulsive.
But while director Frant Gwo and his writing team blend Cixin Liu's source novel with elements from American-made sci-fi disaster films—including "Armageddon," "The Day After Tomorrow," and "Sunshine"—they synthesize them in a visually dynamic, emotionally engaging way that sets the project apart from its Western cousins, and marks it as a great and uniquely Chinese science fiction film.
Production designer Gao Ang has created an expansive wasteland which recalls The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Snowpiercer (2013), but exerts its own prophetic power.
The Wandering Earth is derivative of nearly everything that’s come before it: Aside from Blade Runner , there are whiffs of Snowpiercer , Sunshine , Predator (seriously), Interstellar , 2012 , anything that featured a super-smart, murderous supercomputer (Mother, HAL, Proteus IV) and Star Wars , with a transport truck subbing for the Millennium Falcon on a final run on the warp core.
Fight scenes will remind you more of TV Power Rangers than they do Pacific Rim .
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However, the movie appears to be accomplishing what Zhang Yimou’s considerably higher-profile The Great Wall could not in winning over global audiences.
Remember when the South Korean movie Train to Busan looked better than World War Z did?
That said, China devoured Hollywood nonsense like “Warcraft” and “Transformers: Age of Extinction” — and now, “The Wandering Earth” suggests it has amassed enough firepower to flip that dynamic and see if their multiplex offerings might interest American viewers whose lust for spectacle isn’t satisfied by the Avengers.