"The Wandering Earth" is one of my favorites in today's 21st Century Sci-Fi production. Ranked as the fifth of the highest-grossing films and also fifth of the highest-grossing non-English films to date, it starred as China's first full-scale interstellar spectacular in the Hollywood Reporter's publication.
THE PLOT: a set between the current world and the horror of possibility
What makes "The Wandering Earth" initially fascinating is its plot loosely based on the novel The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin. I even call this plot 'brilliant' because of its appeal to Sci-Fi and dystopian fans. The way the film introduces it makes you feel the goosebumps as you listen to a deep and solemn voice narrating the terror that brings havoc into life on Earth.
Well, what terror could that be?
In 2061, the aging Sun will turn into a red giant, threatening to engulf the Earth within 100 years. This phenomenon threatens all the nations across the globe, so they unite to plan an important project that pushes Earth away from the solar system and to its new home 4.367 light-years away.
Driven by this reason, humanity starts to build fusion-powered Earth engines (in the Northern hemisphere) to push the Earth away and torque engines (along the equator) to stop the planet's rotation.
Each Earth engine has an underground city below it that will shelter humanity from the aftermath disasters of moving the Earth; because when the project begins, tsunamis will wipe out some of the population, and weather will violently change. To survive, one must draw lots to enter the safe underground city.
When the project has finished all these engines and underground cities, they start to propel the Earth into a long voyage that will take 2500 years. To guide this mission into the right path, the Navigation Platform International Space Station (NPISS) comes up into space to become the analyst center and crow's nest of the project.
If ever the entire project fails, Earth will be abandoned and the NPISS will continue travelling to the new solar system to terraform a planet with Earth's biosphere (with different DNA and seeds of multiple species).
THE CHARACTERS: their emotions and struggles
Intertwined with this fate of humanity, Liu Peiqiang, a Chinese astronaut, attends to his seventeen-year-long duty at the NPISS. This duty leaves his son Liu Qi on Earth's underground city without any parents, considering that his wife is terminally ill.
On Earth, Liu Qi develops hatred towards his father as he grows into an adult, and this is where the movie opens the plot into the main storyline.
How does it open the storyline?
Hatred locks up Liu Qi into a shell of will to do something stubborn as always. He involves himself in illegal materials such as smuggled identification cards and space suits from a criminal gang, so he can exit the underground city anytime and walk on the Earth's frozen surface. His exposure to such activity brings him into the bigger picture of space reality, involving him in the about-to-happen disaster to the Wandering Earth project. Well, in his re-walking on the surface, he finds himself a prey to the nearing danger of Jupiter on the Earth's sky.
On the other hand, Liu Peiqiang, who is about to go home from his seventeen-year-long duty at space, notices the disaster too and needs to battle the tragedy he fears the most— Earth being gravitated towards a bigger material and crashing into destruction. Viewers could see how Liu Peiqiang will enter this anxiety. It's space, and we don't know how strange space and technology are.
What appears to be Liu Peiqiang's second biggest hindrance here is the fact that his co-astronauts are in a forced hibernation facilitated by the NPISS computer programming and he's the only one who could do something to save the Earth. In here, we could notice the element of science fiction in which humanity battles its own creation— automated technology.
Well, I couldn't really fully explain how the movie went. That's for you to find out.
At the end of the movie, Liu Peiqiang and Liu Qi find a beautiful resolution to each other as they face the catastrophe separately and realize various things to themselves.
DYSTOPIA AND GENERAL FEEDBACK
This movie is a hundred-percent worth of your time. I have watched it two times already, and it does not fail bringing me the satisfaction as a dystopian fan myself. I know it is a science fiction, but the nature of horror it brings, is quite intriguing.
In the future that humanity finds itself more advanced than it is now and faces "that" kind of fate, could we unite altogether to create solutions that benefit everyone? Knowing the state of global diplomacy, nowadays, brings perplexity to such. Today's pandemic is even an example that nations play a "blaming" game and "political" show than "unified" planning to survive.
Just think of it in the box. The engulfing of Earth is not impossible, but we can't really say it is possible either to be witnessed by humans. Science says it is about to happen a billion of years from now, but theoretically speaking, what if humanity witnesses that a century later? The unity amid diversity is a big political question, and we know we find unity when we all become a tribe trying to exist together.
The Wandering Earth brought that thought into a plot. When humanity becomes more practical on reasoning rather than prideful on depths, they unite to create solutions that benefit their sides mutually. In the movie, that "unity" seemed to be successful since the Earth voyaged into a path that is about to enter the darkness of space and to track the stars.
However, it shows a different taste of horror. In a life along the advancements of technology, we find "an enemy" into such. We tend to explore the depths of space life, automated machine, and our original identity as humans with emotions. In Wandering Earth, Liu Peiqiang tries to battle the "lost of hope" with the situation of Earth. He knows there's a way to save "Earth" from crashing into Jupiter, yet the automated technology of the navigation platform antagonizes him.
It is an area to explore of "what-if's", and I really want to recommend this masterpiece to everyone!