The Wandering Earth II popped up at my local theater here in the US unexpectedly. So I caught up on the two hour original (which I didn’t exactly love) and then hit the theater for the three hour sequel. I’ve done dumber things to watch a movie.

Turns out, this is a prequel to the original film. It covers all the problems – and there three hours of problems – they had getting the Earth ready to relocate to Alpha Centauri (quick recap: the sun is expanding and will kill the earth so they build 10,000 world engines to fly the planet to a new star… you know, that old trope).

The film’s tone is more serious than the more adventurous/silly original and they have improved the visual effects a great deal. It deals more with the bureaucratic issues of relocating a planet so there’s probably more “realism” on the human scale… but perhaps even less on the geoengineering scale. Too bad the characters themselves are even more one-note than before (which at least had some family dynamics).

One major problem I had with the film were the subtitles. I’m not the fastest reader in the world but I’m hardly the slowest… but these subtitles were often not on screen long enough to read. Unless the translation was three or four words long, I’d get half way through an explained before the text vanished. And since 80% of the dialog is exposition, that was a bit of a frustration.

That said, I still got the gist of the plot and still could roll my eyes at some of the dumber ideas. For example, to get all 10,000 world engines to power up and fire, they had to “turn the internet back on”… which meant diving into flooded cities to activate the central trunks. I’m pretty sure if you’re building 10,000 world engines, 10,000 underground cities, and sending ALL the world’s nukes to the moon, then maybe just setting up some new servers would solve the problem instead. But what do I know about geoengineering, amiright?

I’m pretty mixed on the flick… I can’t decide if it’s a bad movie or a slightly decent film that has major problems (like the first). I think I’m settling on bad though. Maybe that could be solved with a dub or improved subs, but it doesn’t make the characters more interesting or the scenarios less ridiculous.

Score: 65