I was recently surprised to see The Wandering Earth 2 show up at my local cinema. I’m not sure I want to spend three hours in the cinema to watch it but certainly won’t if I havn’t seen the original. Which I hadn’t… but it’s been on Netflix for a few years now and I watched a touch of it back in 2019/2020. So I buckled down to finish it off and remove that as an excuse to avoid the sequel.

The Wandering Earth is a very silly movie that has, shall we say, dubious physics and engineering. The Sun is going to expand and wipe out the Earth in one hundred years so all the Earth governments <snicker> bandy together to build <snicker> 10,000 giant engines that will propel <snicker> the Earth out of the solar system and on its 2500 year <snicker> journey to Alpha Centauri.

Yeah, I think this Chinese film has out-Moonfalled Moonfall. It gets the Space 1999 Excellence in Planetary Physics award. It’s a big dumb audacious film that operates less as a sci-fi flick and more as a disater film. Y’see, things don’t go well and a crew of random people have to drive pell-mell across the frozen surface of the Earth to prevent the planet from smacking into Jupiter.

The film is certainly ambitious… even if it’s visual effects don’t live up to those ambitions. Indeed, while not terrible, there’s enough FX shots that a great number of them are pretty mediocre. But they also have a loose charm and ridiculous silliness to them that maybe I can forgive them a little bit.

I’m less forgiving about the bland characters/actors who are probably doing the best they can with a silly script. Very few of the heroics are all that well filmed or edited, leaving much of the movie just kind of cold. A bunch of noise and movement without much sense of adventure or thrills.

The flick is ok for what it is. If you can accept its nebulous connection to reality, there’s probably enough to enjoy. It’s a pretty lukewarm positive from me though.

Score: 72