Terra à Deriva 2: Destino

Over the last decade, Chinese cinema has made giant leaps and bounds in terms of quality and sophistication of their films, especially in sci-fi genre. The Wandering Earth and this prequel, The Wandering Earth II, is a significant milestone. As a prequel, it has more depth in the story than the first, though the premise behind the main conflict is a bit shallow to be believed, as if "digital life" and survival of the planet are mutually exclusive. Pizza OR pepperoni? What kind of a decision is that? You still need the pizza, with or without the pepperoni.

But like its predecessor, the problem is pacing. The story is grand, an epic tale of an audacious plan to save mankind and Earth from the dying sun. But the pacing is so ridiculously fast, that it's difficult to enjoy and appreciate it. It's so focused on the crisis from all angles that it feels like every scene and every shot is less than two seconds long. For subtitle readers, it's even worse to follow. On top of that, there is visual information overload, with names flashing on the screen. There is so much going on, you will be afraid to blink and miss an important plot point.

And then there are the annoying tropes. I think this is the third or fourth Chinese film and TV show I've recently watched that has a shrill little girl/daughter yelling and crying "Baba! Baba!" to stoke our sympathy and emotional attachment to. And, where do they find these foreign actors?!? They cannot act and they are loud. Perhaps this is how they want to portray westerners, but there are plenty of international films shown in China--they have to know how bad these actors are, right? With so many actors (waiters) in Hollywood looking for work, you'd think it'd be easy to find more passable supporting cast.

Despite all this, you're not going to watch The Wandering Earth series for the acting--this is a CGI spectacle. It's gorgeous, and if you treat it like cut scenes from a triple-A video game, you'll enjoy it a lot.

It's a catastrophical & sci-fic film with a novel epic narrative. The Wandering Earth 2 is more about the values of a community of shared future that unites all mankind. The special effects, needless to say, were a huge improvement over the first film, and the plot filled in the first film's shortcomings. At the same time, as the second of the series, it did not regress like most movies, but made obvious progress,. The overall score is 9 points, looking forward to the third part to bring us a better story.

There are three lines in the movie which build a wonderful construction. I promise it deserves one ticket.

By the way, it's a prequel. However,it doesn't matter to me.

I saw this film last night with perhaps twenty others. Most of the audience were young and female. And Mandarin speaking.

My province in Canada - British Columbia - has a large Asian community but this mainland China blockbuster is only being shown in two cities, Vancouver and Victoria.

Pity.

In some ways the film's story surprised me: there is a mission, the mission seems largely Chinese led, but the success of this mission depends entirely on the cooperation of thirty three nations.

We dive in quickly with the arrival of 1138 new recruits who are blasted into space at 9 Gs. We are introduced to key characters who will have a role to play over the next three hours, amd thirty years.

Their mission is almost stillborn because of a successful, well organized and coordinated terrorist attack by 'terrorists' of DIGITAL LIFE. This group strongly disagrees with the coalition to build massive engines to move the earth away from the advancing sun predicted by science to hit Earth in one hundred years.

The balance of the film focuses on efforts to build those engines; preserve space elevators; move or blow up the moon. Obstacles at every point.

I grew irritated by on screen announcements of events that would unfold: in years, months, hours, minutes...

I appreciated how Sfx were used to show the great strides science could implement especially the supercomputer 550 and its successors.

I was able to sort out the leading players: two Chinese officials, a Russian and an American in a futuristic UN; two key Chinese scientists- hello ANDY LAU who looked impossibly young in the scenes with his AI daughter, and a handful of pilots who bond despite their nations' politics.

Indeed the closest I came to shredding a tear came late with said pilots 'volunteered' on essentially asus ice mission.

Did anyone else feel key characters were killed off, only to. Resurrected?

This film should challenge you: it should make you sad; you may feel you are helpless against what fate Mankind is maki f for itself.

If a significant part of the world's population questioned the existence of COVID, a significant number of people believe an election was stolen, I am relieved this film ends with "I choose hope".

Earth 2 has no ridiculous young man to do stupid things like in Earth 1, characters do the best to solve problems. Performers did their best in characterizing, and the story makes the Wandering Earth Project more reasonable. But personally, it has some cons:

1. Obvious post dubbing. Many characters talk in different mouth shapes, especially the black boy like he was talkin English but pronounced the others. These scenes quite disturb the watching.

2. The data and the effects of Earth Engines seems not right. It's not spoilers but if you started Earth suddenly you should have massive earthquakes, huge tsunamis and weather disasters... Oh I'm going to spoil so I have to shut now. Hope you've watched Earth1.

3. You got VR tec android but you ummmm why don't you guys create more operating bots? Oop I didn't spoil I'm talking about the trailers.

Still, I will give 7.5/10 for this movie. Hope they can fix cons and do well in the next. This gonna be a great series.

The Wandering Earth II tells a disaster story from an oriental point of view instead of the western one (which is getting more and more cliche), where humans work as a team to face the overwhelming crisis. There's no hero who can save the Earth single-handedly; still, every effort matters.

In many ways, TWE II is a true sight for the sore eyes in nowadays movie industry, even by the criteria of Hollywood. Outstanding visuals & acoustics, compelling narrative, numerous convincing concepts and details, and furthermore, a much more "universal" human value. It raises the ceiling for movies of the same genre to a whole new level.

If you let go of all the stereotypical thinking and preconceived bias against Chinese movies, then TWE II is definitely worth seeing (better in IMAX).

(Taking one star off in case they get cocky /doge)