THE WANDERING EARTH: Science Fiction MADE IN CHINA

Cixin Liu is currently one of the hottest names in world science fiction literature. The Chinese author was honored with the Hugo Award for his novel The Three-Body Problem, the first part of a trilogy that also includes The Dark Forest and Death’s End. All these books have remained on bestseller lists for over a decade, and we’ve seen the screen adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. It’s no surprise that filmmakers seized on Liu’s ideas and translated them into the language of cinema. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the Americans who did it, but the Chinese. The first title based on Liu’s prose was The Wandering Earth, which became a box-office phenomenon in China. For a moment, one could think that American sci-fi blockbusters might have a real competitor. For now, they do not.

The plot of this escapist nightmare is based on an idea from one of Liu’s early short stories of the same title. It was published in 2000, at a time when people were seriously pondering the future of Earth and its inhabitants. The Sun is burning out and will soon expand into a red dwarf, which will destroy the Solar System. Humanity joins forces across all divisions and develops technology capable of transporting our planet to the vicinity of the nearest star—Proxima Centauri. The entire process is expected to take several generations and is humanity’s only chance for survival. Naturally, such an undertaking presents many problems, which the main characters must overcome.

Starting ideas in science fiction can be among the most bizarre, but what matters is their proper presentation—suspending disbelief, switching off logic, and inviting the viewer into a story where the most important elements are the people, their emotions, and their struggles. The Wandering Earth lacks all of this, or handles it with the sensitivity of a teenager writing their first screenplays for the drawer. Of course, a film of this type is aimed at a mass audience, but—by Jupiter!—among that audience, there might be someone who wants to feel something during the screening. Something other than numbness brought on by an overload of colors, rapid-fire editing, shaky camera work, and special effects that are, frankly, far from the best.

The first minutes still promise some personal dimension to this story, combining in a single scene the grandfather, father, and son whose fates will influence the planet’s future. But the further we go, the worse it becomes—the characters turn out to be template cutouts, flat figures whose moving shadows glide across the scenery and props. The story is populated entirely by such characters, and the relationships between them are painfully stereotypical.

The script’s literalness is also grating. How do we learn about Earth’s predicament? Through a multi-minute sequence in which a narrator explains what is happening to our Sun and what awaits us in the near future. The narration overlays standard images of ecological disasters, panicked crowds, and so on. After this introduction, we cut to the “proper” story—and what do we see? A television screen showing the end of a news broadcast in which the presenter simply finishes what the narrator has just told us. Virtually every dialogue in the film consists of characters exchanging information about what they are about to do.

And then we watch them do it. The camera darts here and there, the editor chops the footage like mad—as if he were paid per cut—while everything unfolds in sterile sets, in shots resembling computer-game renders. The whole thing feels more like an animation, and so the planetary threat seems all the more unreal. Though such a statement would be unfair to many animated films that actually manage to evoke genuine emotion.

The film has been widely praised for its special effects, but even here there’s plenty of sloppiness. Everything looks fine—until it begins to move. The views of outer space are spectacular, but the moment the camera or an object shifts, the spell is broken. The vehicles fare worst, ignoring every law of physics and moving as if detached from their surroundings. I’m far from judging scenes purely by their realism, but even by the loose standards of sci-fi, some of the things happening here are simply inexplicable. The filmmakers aimed for spectacle but exercised no restraint, leaving viewers fatigued and overwhelmed after just half an hour. And there’s still a long way to go…

Worst of all, the film fails entirely to deliver on the promise of its title. The Wandering Earth could have been a story about a lost human species searching for a new home. Through the stories of individuals, we could have witnessed the toil and hardship of the greatest and most important mission in history. But no—the film never lets us forget that it is nothing more than a showcase of what Chinese filmmakers can do when they master software for special effects, realistic models, and spatial audio.

That works well enough for a fifteen-minute tech demo, but never for a feature-length film. The viewer is left with the sense of having just watched two hours of cosmic nonsense and gained absolutely nothing from the experience. I only hope that The Wandering Earth won’t discourage anyone from exploring the works of Cixin Liu, which offer far, far more than this flawed film.