The Wandering Earth is derivative of nearly everything that’s come before it: Aside from Blade Runner, there are whiffs of Snowpiercer, Sunshine, Predator (seriously), Interstellar, 2012, anything that featured a super-smart, murderous supercomputer (Mother, HAL, Proteus IV) and Star Wars, with a transport truck subbing for the Millennium Falcon on a final run on the warp core. Wang is rescuing either a lost repair crew, a broken underground city engine or the main thruster at Sulawesi. Cue heroics, led by Liu, wrestling with deadly computer MOSS on the space station and Wang Lei (Li Guangjie, Drug War) on the ground. Naturally, it’s at this point a mechanical malfunction ends with Earth getting caught in Jupiter’s gravity well, with imminent doom in 36 hours.

One day deciding he wants to go outside, he breaks his adoptive little sister Han Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai, whose role is to be a girl) out of school to join him. Things go as planned, and 17 years later with everyone living in giant underground, Blade Runner-esque cities, Qi (Qu Chuxiao) is a rebellious, resentful young man, furious with his father for “lying” to him about returning after his mission and killing his mother. He leaves his young son Qi behind in the care of his father, Han Ziang (Hong Kong comedy veteran Ng Man-tat). There are three parts to this plan, and the first involves astronaut Liu Peiqiang ( Wolf Warrior’s Wu Jing) going to work on a new space station that’s going to act as a sort of tugboat for the planet. The world mobilizes and the United Earth Government begins plans to - wait for it - install engines on the Equator (!), stop the globe’s spin (!!) and head off to Alpha Centauri (!!!) to carry on life at a new star.

In the near future, our sun very unexpectedly heads toward a red giant stage and will engulf the Earth and the solar system in roughly a century. Soft-selling the propaganda helps.īased on a story by Hugo-winning hard sci-fi writer Liu Cixin ( The Three-Body Problem), Wandering Earth has just enough real science in it to make anyone with a basic understanding of gravity roll their eyes but brush it off in order to enjoy the bigger picture, which also rolls in some hoary family drama and a heaping helping of redemption via personal sacrifice.

The Wandering Earth drops the ball narratively: The story is nigh on incomprehensible and the “hero” is egregiously irritating, doing nothing to earn his big emotional third-act moment, but there’s enough here to earn the film a healthy amount of downloads and likely its share of special presentations on the festival circuit. Of course, as with any dollop of sci-fi foolery, there are ludicrous leaps in logic - and physics - that will grate on the nerves of non-nerds but which could get a pass from genre fans in the mood for a bit of old-fashioned space opera.

The Wandering Earth by Liu Cixin