The Wandering Earth (2019)

[Dr. Whom]

Just caught the Wandering Earth. As far as the plausibility of the basic premise goes, it is right up there with The Core. To recap: to escape the expanding sun, Earth is fitted with engines to propell it to another solar system. Mankind retreats underground while the surface freezes over. Before you laugh, this technique has already been successfully pioneered by Planet Medora in Star Maidens. All goes well, until Earth bumps into Jupiter.

I found the movie pretty confusing. The plot goes all over the place, people chasing one McGuffin, which turns out to be irrevelant, and then joining with others to chase another McGuffin. The computer of the space station pulling a HAL 9000 (including an ominous red light), except that it doesn’t, and then it still sort of does? Secondary characters aren’t properly introduced so that apart from the main characters, I had a hard time telling who was who and what they were supposed to do. The result is a lot of scenes of people frantically trying to so stuff, while everything crashes down around them. About half the movie seems to take place in collapsing structures, crashing vehicles or with debris raining down from the skies.

The screenplay mainly seems to be written to include as many spectacular and cool scenes as possible. There are pretty impressive scenes, especially the parts in space. So if you can get past the cheesiness and silliness of it all, it is a wild roller coaster ride, with danger striking at every point and lots of derring do. It has everything a good disaster movie needs, and then some. There is even a long burst from a minigun with the spent cases going clunk clunk clunk. No idea why that was put in, perhaps the director wanted to give a shout out to Predator. Also, if you live in an area where the consumption of cannabis is legal, I’d say that would enhance the experience.

Things I’ve learned
The future United Government of Earth speaks a highly refined French
Vodka is a major fire hazard on space stations.
 

[Svengoolie 3]

Yeah,  I chose to refuse refuse watch this movie. It's made in china, which meant every frame and word had ha be approved by the Chinese government. Given the horrible fascism of he Chinese government and how it treats it's peolle I really don't want to see any film it approves of.

Thanks for letting me know I didn't miss much.


If I want to see a movie earth movie i'll watch Gorath.