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The wandering earth.
United Entertainment Partners
It's hard not to feel like you have a glimpse of the future of movies with a ticket for The wandering earth, a Chinese space show that grossed more than $ 300 million the first week of its inauguration in its home country earlier this month, was opened in US theaters and was acquired by Netflix. Set in 2,500 years, it is a promising but pragmatic sci-fi image that understands what US blockbusters are still struggling to admit: the response to climate change will pose enormous infrastructural challenges and require drastic measures on a planetary scale. Perhaps a country like China, accustomed to a frantic pace of construction and exceptional organization, is seriously considering how much humanity will have to redefine its lifestyles to survive a force also catastrophic. But in the dystopian future of this film, it is not the heat that threatens life, but a stuffy gel.
Directed by Frant Gwo, The wandering earth transforms our planet into a spaceship, moving away from the dying sun in search of a new solar system. The Earth does not turn any more, but travels the galaxy, propelled by a constellation of engines on half of its territory. What remains of humanity lies in underground cities grouped around engines, while the uninhabitable surface is reserved for specialized workers who extract fuel to power these engines. Despite the team of scientific consultants in production, physics in The wandering earth is probably a lot of hooey. But the construction of the film world, which occupies much of its first third, is undeniably new and fascinating. Rarely a film boasts of such a technocratic heart.
Three kilometers underground, the decor of Beijing III certainly arouses more interest than his hero, Liu Qi (Qu Chuxiao), a young man reckless and angry who surprises his beloved adoptive adoptive sister (Zhao Jinmai) her for the lunar new year with an (illegal) trip to the surface, where neither has ever been. Liu Qi's father, astronaut Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing), is preparing to return to Earth and return to his family after 17 years of service aboard the International Space Station, which helps the global government navigate the planet. .
The wandering earth unquestionably reflects the Chinese party's line by demonstrating that bureaucracy can handle misfortune through central and intelligent planning engineering.
The characters remain archetypes, but the film ends up winning his syrupy sentimentality. The wandering earth is not afraid of spilling mountains of exhibitions and catching up in its elaborate framework can be painful for an action-oriented action thriller, especially when subtitles are scrolling or fast cuts are flying overhead the points of the plot. But the film shows such confidence in its details – and plays so well with futuristic gadgets like Liu Qi's robotic members – that the lack of a hand held is more often the reflection of a refusal to let the most discreet viewer possible.
It does not take long before brothers and sisters are arrested by the authorities and forced to participate in a dangerous rescue mission. Mike Sui's comic relief character, Tim, is a half-Chinese, half-white Australian, whose cultural authenticity – an occasional trope in contemporary Asian cinema – becomes a gag. It was during the mission that father and son learned that a spike in Jupiter's gravitational pull placed the Earth on a collision course with the largest gas planet. At the approach of Jupiter, his oily eye dominates the sky of the Earth, under which humanity hides under his indiscreet and old look. As terrifying as the orange planet is, it is also a technical marvel, as well as many special effects of the film. Several action sequences, including one in the elevator cage of a crumbling skyscraper, are designed to make the heart beat.
You could spend a lot of The wandering earth count the films he borrows: the terrifying indifference of space Gravity, the frustration of human myopia Arrival, the know-it-all-ism and the insistent red look of HAL in 2001: The Space Odyssey, a distant cousin who tries to prevent Liu Peiqiang from making a last-ditch effort to save his son and the billions of other people from Earth from Jupiter's bad atmosphere. It's hard to imagine a global genocide, but The wandering earth perhaps helps us better visualize it when world government leaders decide at some point to place all their hopes in the dream of seeing embryos and plant seeds stored on the ISS restart the human species a day later the destruction of the Earth. All this ingenuity, and we still could not survive for more than two hundred thousand years.
Do films on the prevention of global annihilation inspire us by reminding us that the climate cataclysm need not necessarily be inevitable, or are they nothing more than soothing fantasies of cooperation and rationality? Like last year First reformed illustrated, no other problem arouses despair so deserving. The wandering earth It can be argued that the Chinese party's position is to demonstrate that bureaucracy can manage its loss through central planning and intelligent engineering. The urgency of the crisis leaves no room for dissent. It is certainly an attractive notion, and more and more difficult to imagine on this side of the Pacific. Does such a belief in the state's supremacy constitute propaganda for the government in China, as some have argued? Perhaps. But at this point, it may be the best hope we have.
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