The Wandering Earth (2019)

The Wandering Earth (2019)
Chinese Title: 流浪地球
Translation: Straying Earth

 

Starring: Jacky Wu Jing, Ng Man-Tat, Jin Long, Qu Chu-Xiao, Li Guangjie, Zhao Jinmei, Mike Sui Kai, Qu Jingjing, Zhang Yi-Chi, Yang Haoyu
Director: Frant Gwo
Action Director: Yan Hua, Hao Zhenjie
SPFX Director: Ding Yanlai, Eric Xu, Zhao Haoqiang

 

I find the trajectory of Wu Jing’s career endlessly fascinating. He stepped onto the scene at age 18 with the lead role in Yuen Woo-Ping’s Tai Chi 2, made about two years after wire-fu films set in period had stopped being profitable. Despite being touted as having graduated from the same wushu school that had given us Jet Li and Zhao Wenzhuo, it was clear that, at least in Hong Kong, audiences were already satisfied with the Jet Li they had and didn’t need another one—Vincent Zhao could have told them that. Anyway, after that film was a flop, Jacky Wu tried his luck on TV, which had been a better fit for Zhao.

Wu Jing got another chance at the big time in 2001 when he was given an important supporting role in Tsui Hark’s big-budget CGI fantasy The Legend of Zu. I’m sure that Tsui brought him onboard at Yuen Woo-Ping’s insistence, considering that YWP was that film’s main action director. Although that failed to make him The Next Big Thing, Wu Jing kept at it. His next attempt at the big leagues was the starring role in Drunken Monkey, which was Lau Kar-Leung’s last directorial effort and another attempt for the Shaw Brothers to reclaim their past glory. That film was also a flop and appears to be the final attempt at filmmaking from the once-illustrious Shaw Brothers Studio.

Fortune came knocking at Wu Jing’s door when he took on a supporting role in Wilson Yip’s Sha Po Lang (released in the States as Killzone), a Donnie Yen crime thriller that promised to return Hong Kong cinema back to the action heights of the 1980s. Wu Jing played the knife-wielding cop killer “Jet,” and his fight with Donnie Yen in the alleyway is one for the ages. The film was enough of a success around Asia that it transformed Donnie Yen into Asia’s hope for martial arts cinema and gave Wu Jing’s career new life, usually in supporting roles in Benny Chan movies.

Things really took a turn in the second half of the 2010s, when Wu Jing returned to the Mainland. His first film there was an action movie called Wolf Warrior, which featured British Bootmaster Scott Adkins and was similar in tone and style to the Hong Kong action hit First Option. The movie was enough of a success that a sequel was greenlit with a higher budget. Filming in Africa, Wu Jing made Wolf Warrior 2, which simply blew away box office records in both the People’s Republic of China and on the international market.

The Wandering Earth was Wu Jing’s next “big” film, which he helped fund when the studio’s budget ran out. The film was almost just as successful as Wolf Warrior 2 and currently sits on number 5 on the top Non-English Language Films of all time. The movie itself, if I were to be glib about it, resembles an odd mixture of Ishiro Honda’s Gorath and Michael Bay’s Armageddon. It has the former’s faith in humanity’s ability to set aside petty differences when a problem of global scale presents itself, while wallowing in the latter’s tendency toward emotional manipulation and treating every single set piece as an “all or nothing” climax.

The set-up is that by the middle of the 21^st century, the sun has started to expand, causing all sorts of calamities on the Earth. In about a hundred years, the sun will be so big as to make the Earth completely uninhabitable. To save the planet, the nations of the world have formed a single government and have come up with the plan to build motors all over the world that will fly Earth out of its orbit on a 2500-year journey to Alpha Centauri. Cities will be bult beneath these engines with a housing capacity of 3.5 billion, leaving the other half to perish by the tsunami’s caused by a second set of engines meant to keep the Earth from rotating, or simply freeze to death once the planet gets far enough away from the Sun. Also, there is a new International Space Station built with the intention of assisting the Earth in navigating its way through space.

The movie proper begins with an astronaut Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing) spending time at the beach with his dad (Ng Man-Tat, of Royal Tramp and Heroes Among Heroes) and son, Liu Qi. Peiqiang’s status as an astronaut has guaranteed him two non-lottery passes into the underground city beneath Beijing, which he gives to his dad, Han Ziang, and son—his wife is sick and would not be allowed into the city.

Seventeen years later, the Earth is approaching Jupiter. Part of the Wandering Earth Initiative is to enter Jupiter’s gravity pull and use it to slingshot out of the Solar System at a higher velocity. Things don’t go as planned. A gravity spike from Jupiter pulls the Earth into a collision course of the two planets, with the force of the larger planet’s gravity pulling the Earth’s tectonic plates apart, resulting in earthquakes that disable a third of the Earth Motors. Liu Qi (now played by Qu Chuxiao, of The Yin Yang Master), Han Ziang and their adopted family member, the adolescent Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai), get roped into effort after getting arrested for “joyriding” in a stolen transport vehicle on the Earth’s frozen surface[1]. The three join forces with the military to transport a reactor core to the Earth motor in Hangzhou, near Shanghai.

Meanwhile, Liu Peiqiang is still on the Space Station, coincidentally on the last day of his sojourn in space. While trying to contact his family, whom he now knows is travelling across the icy wasteland that is now the Earth’s surface, the space station’s A.I. computer, called MOSS, pulls a fast one on him and forces him into hibernation. Apparently, the Earth government has a contingency plan for the possible failure to repair the motors and get Earth away from Jupiter, one that even Peiqiang doesn’t know about it. And when Liu’s hibernation is interrupted and he refuses to go back to sleep, MOSS is going to go all HAL on his ass.

Once the Jupiter issue is introduced at the end of the first act, about twenty minutes or so into the film, the movie is a rather dour affair. Much like Armageddon, every single move made by our heroes—the Liu family, some half-Chinese kid named Tim, and the soldiers (whom we’re supposed to care for, but barely even learn their names)—turns into a mini-climax that results in the death of one or more characters. The second act ends with the seeming victory of the inhabitants of Earth quashed by the reality of their situation, so even as they are struggling to put a last-ditch effort into saving their planet, there is an overhanging feeling of despair, with people random killing themselves and stuff like that. The film lacks the typical inclusion of crass Michael Bay humor needed to balance out the seriousness of the predicament, or at least Mimi Leder’s constant feeling of hope that kept Deep Impact strong. The hopelessness introduced at the twenty-minute mark is tangible throughout, only dissipating in the last ten minutes or so.

That said, the action is frequent and well staged, with Donnie Yen collaborators Yan Hua and Hao Zhenjie in charge of the stuntwork. There’s a neat bit where the transporter enters a canyon in the remains of Shanghai, in which the plateau is actually made up of water that froze in between the buildings. To continue their journey, they enter a building and ascend an elevator shaft to reach the top of the “plateau.” I thought that was pretty cool. Moreover, the FX work is quite good all around, boasting the talents of WETA Workshop (The Lord of the Rings films); Pixomondo (Hugo; the Star Trek franchise and Game of Thrones); and More VFX, a Chinese studio that did Double World and The Island. The only effects that I thought were unconvincing, personally, happened at the end following an explosion in Jupiter’s atmosphere when you see a sort of POV shot of thousands of flaming projectiles hurtling toward Earth. But beyond that, the film looks quite good.

My main complaint about The Wandering Earth is that it feels longer than it is. The movie is a good thirty minutes shorter than Armageddon but feels just as long. I think it has a lot to do with the placement of the emotionally-manipulative flashbacks that pop up whenever a character is about to bite the dust or make an important decision. While giving some backstory into the lives of said character, it draws out the scene far more than it needs to. Moreover, every set piece has about three or four things going wrong simultaneously that different characters will need to put themselves in harm’s way in order to address or correct. That means that the movie often has its action scenes wearing out their welcome, no matter how good the FX are or how well the stunts are mounted. A few cuts here and there could have done wonders for the pacing. It’s kinda funny when you think about it: about three to five minutes of well-placed cuts could have made a really good sci-fi blockbuster, as opposed to merely a pretty good one.

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[1] - This leads to an amusing bit where Ng Man-Tat tries to bribe the guard into letting his grandson and adopted granddaughter go free using vintage porn...by vintage, I mean porn made in the 2010s, when the film was made. Cue the next scene with Ng-Man-Tat sitting in the cell with them.