The fourth-highest-grossing movie of all time is Ne Zha 2, an animated fantasy adventure film made in China. Most Americans haven’t seen or even heard of this movie, but it’s hugely popular. It’s becoming increasingly common for Chinese movies to make this kind of impact.
Take The Wandering Earth, a 2019 sci-fi film that made $700 million at the worldwide box office. With those kinds of numbers, you’d figure the film would be a cultural touchstone, but most people in the United States don’t know about it. However, they CAN watch it on Netflix, which has a long history of hosting great foreign language content.
The Wandering Earth is ridiculous…
…ly good
The Wandering Earth is set decades into our future, when the sun has unexpectedly started expanding at a rapid rate and threatens to engulf the planet. The leaders of Earth respond by creating a one-world government and building giant thrusters they place along the planet’s equator. These thrusters stop the Earth’s rotation. Then, the plan is to move Earth over four light-years away to the Alpha Centauri star system. During the 2,500-year-long trip, those humans left will live in vast, heated cities underground while the surface freezes.
All of this happens before the main conflict of the movie sets in, and it just gets more implausible from there. We meet a few key characters, including astronaut Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing), who has been in space for years; and his adult son Liu Qi (Qu Chuxiao), who has developed a bit of a rebellious streak. After stealing a truck and acquiring some thermal suits on the black market, Qi convinces his foster sister Han Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai) to ditch school and take a joyride with him on the surface, but while they’re up there, a new cataclysm strikes: the Earth flies too close to Jupiter and gets caught in the massive planet’s gravity, threatening all life on Earth…again.
Also, up on a space station, Liu Peiqiang is dealing with a powerful AI who may or may not have humanity’s best interests at heart. All the characters do their part to get Earth back on course, with total extinction guaranteed if they fail.
The Wandering Earth is an homage to ’90s-era disaster movies
The less you think about it, the happier you’ll be
If you read that summary and rolled your eyes a bit, you’re forgiven. ‘How can the Earth possibly have enough resources to power a 2,500-year journey through the cold, dark, sunless depths of space?’ you might ask. Ignore those kinds of questions. The Wandering Earth isn’t meant to be scientifically accurate; there are other movies and shows you can check out if you want that.
What The Wandering Earth does well is pay homage to the cheerfully preposterous disaster flicks of the 1990s and 2000s, like Armageddon; the plot here is only slightly less ludicrous than the idea of NASA recruiting oil drillers to blow up an asteroid. There’s also quite a bit of 2001: A Space Odyssey mixed into the story, with Liu Peiqiang grappling with a HAL 9000-esque AI system. The underground cities will remind viewers of Blade Runner. The people who made The Wandering Earth have never seen a sci-fi movie they didn’t like.
A lot of the characters and plot beats feel familiar. There’s a young hotshot who learns to temper his impulses, a comic relief guy, and a character who brings the movie home with an eye-watering act of self-sacrifice. The movie is derivative, but that’s the same thing as being bad. In fact, if you give yourself over to it, The Wandering Earth will sweep you away on a torrent of emotion. It’s about marveling at the eye-popping special effects (one memorable shot features human figures scrambling across the wasteland that used to be Earth as the Eye of Jupiter fills the horizon), and screaming with them as they curse the heavens.
At one point, a character actually unloads a rail gun at Jupiter while shouting, “Screw you, Jupiter!” That sounds silly, and it is, but it’s a buoyant kind of silliness you only find in over-the-top action epics like this. And hard as it is to picture the nations of Earth all coming together in the face of a crisis, it’s heartwarming to see it happen onscreen.
The Wandering Earth foreshadows things to come
Not including the sequel
In 2023, The Wandering Earth 2 came out. It’s a prequel to the original film, and depicts some of the crises humanity encountered before getting sucked into Jupiter’s orbit. Those crises include terrorism, a debate over whether to digitize human minds so people can survive even if their bodies don’t, and the possibility that the Moon might crash into Earth.
The Wandering Earth 2 also did very well at the worldwide box office, taking in over $600 million. But neither of these movies made much of a splash in western countries, and only the first Wandering Earth film is available to stream on Netflix.
There have been many Chinese movies that have been huge hits in their home country, but that haven’t caught on elsewhere, including the action thriller Wolf Warrior 2 ($870 million), the racing movie Pegasus 3 ($656 million), and the time travel comedy Hi, Mom ($822 million). But sooner or later, one of these Chinese blockbusters is bound to break through. After all, Chinese audiences watch big-budget Hollywood movies all the time; how long before the reverse becomes true?
For further watching
The Wandering Earth is based on a short story by Liu Cixin, the author behind the hugely successful Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy. Netflix is adapting those books right now as 3 Body Problem, one of the most underrated sci-fi shows on the platform. So if you’re looking for a sci-fi drama that’s a bit more plausible than The Wandering Earth while being every bit as intense, you might want to start there.