The Wandering Earth, a Chinese sci-fi film that quietly appeared on Netflix, is based on a short story by Liu Cixin, the country’s most popular sci-fi author. The film has achieved extraordinary financial success, generating more than $700 million (£538m) worldwide, $693m of which was collected in China. It now stands as the country’s second-highest grossing film of all time, after Wolf Warrior 2; the second-highest grossing non-English film of all time; and the third highest-grossing film of 2019, after Avengers: Endgame and Captain Marvel.
The release of The Wandering Earth comes at a time when Chinese sci-fi is ascendant. Liu is known as China’s Arthur C. Clarke, and the comparison is apposite: he is the first ever Chinese recipient of the Hugo award, and his The Three-Body Problem series, a trilogy of novels praised by Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama, is currently being adapted for the screen by Amazon – supposedly into the most expensive TV show of all time. Sci-fi has been burgeoning in China for several decades, but recent western interest is the result of diligent translators. Ken Liu, who translated The Three-Body Problem into English in 2014, released his second set of short story translation this February, Broken Stars. The stories are typical of the genre: wildly imaginative reactions to a country undergoing rapid technological change.
The Wandering Earth opens in the middle of a 2,500-year escape plan. Our Sun is swelling, its change into a red giant imminent; humanity must escape its transformation or be wiped out. The solution, devised by Earth's new multilingual world government, is to get the hell out of dodge: 10,000 blue-fire-blowing engines have been strapped across Asia and North America. Spaceship Earth glides through the Milky Way on course for a new star system, its surface a frozen wasteland; humans survive underground, playing feisty games of Mahjong and generally looking miserable. Survival-of-humanity issues arise when gravitational hijinks pull the planet on a collision course with Jupiter.
Despite the promise of the source material, the film is, unfortunately, sentimental and derivative, amounting to little more than a repetitive sequence of action movie clichés. We follow Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing), an astronaut tasked with guiding the Earth to safety, and his son and daughter, in big trouble back on Earth. The narrative hinges on this familial separation, trading in the same tired themes that knit together many action films: a troubled family – father is absent, too busy saving humanity; brother and sister are off the rails, bunking off underground school and sassing grandpa – brought together in cross-generational compassion by escaping CGI peril.
This peril, while impressively rendered, similarly runs the gamut of cliché: protagonists get sucked into space, fall down giant mineshafts, get hailed on by catastrophic weather. They smash out of sleep tanks, rush down the halls of Star Trek-like space stations, pilot “futuristic” vehicles through giant hangars. The writers even chuck in a HAL-like evil AI, which is eventually defeated by a bottle of vodka that Makarov, a token Russian character, left onboard the ship. (Russia gets off lightly: the film’s Australian character, who gleefully describes himself as a “Chinese-Australian co-production”, fulfills the narrative function of crashing around screaming like an idiot.)
Liu’s original short story is far weirder and far more wondrous. Much like Frank Herbert’s Dune, Liu’s work has been praised for its wild scale: a general melancholy hangs over The Wandering Earth, a result of just how bloody long the whole journey is going to take. Set over the narrator’s entire lifetime, the importance of one family’s fate, which propels the film’s plot, seems frivolous in a scope of time that will see millions live and die.
In the book, Liu’s narrator functions primarily as a cipher, to bear witness to a clash between the power of technology and the hostility of space. Liu dedicates long passages to this effect: the Sun shrinks horrifyingly to “the size of a baseball...it hung motionless in the sky, surrounded by a faint, dawn-like halo”. The giant jets “make the entire sky glow as if covered in white-hot lava….The clouds would scatter the beam’s blue-white light, throwing off frenetic, surging rainbow halos”. The oceans freeze then unthaw with “a sharp noise like a thunderclap pierced the low rumble...a long crack appeared, shooting across the frozen ocean like a black fork of lightning.” The movie settles, in contrast, for sending the camera whizzing, Michael Bay-like, between spiraling CGI galaxies. (During these sequences, the subtitles on Netflix read "thrilling music continues").
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The differences between the adaptation and its source material is perhaps only to be expected given the hype around the film’s massive budget and Hollywood-rivalling special effects. “Sci-fi is the pinnacle of the industry,” the director Frant Gwo told the FT, and said that watching Terminator 2 in the 1990s “planted a seed in my heart, and I dreamt of making science fiction.” This is revealing: Terminator 2 was another film that swapped out the cerebral plot of the original for a big-budget, explosion-filled VFX extravaganza. But this conception of sci-fi as an opportunity to demonstrate how far your visual effects technology has developed can dilute a story’s subtlety.
The Wandering Earth’s financial success nevertheless suggests the beginning of a new era for Chinese sci-fi. We should hope that this success doesn’t just inspire films concerned with revenue and explosions, in the vein of Independence Day or Armageddemon, but also, like its literary precursors, subtler stories concerned with human beings and their struggles. (These concerns can harmonise: see, for instance, Denis Villeneuve's Arrival). At one point in The Wandering Earth, the narrator states that “movies and novels produced four centuries ago were baffling to modern audiences. It was incomprehensible to us why people in the Ante-solar Era invested so much emotion into matters that had nothing to do with survival. Watching the hero or heroine suffer or weep for love was bizarre beyond words.” It is questions like this, about our values and their contingency in a changing world, that animate the best of our science fiction.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
