The Wandering Earth II

Watched this last night and my head is still spinning, can't give too much away as my brain hasn't fully processed what was going on.

The only way I can describe it is when they were editing the film all the scenes where their was no action were cut leaving a bombardment of visuals, this included the non dubbed version with English subtitles flashing up on screen so fast it was hard to read.

Don't get me wrong TWE2 is a great film and really good fun if you love your big bold Si-fi with huge special effects, limited character development and explosions.

Thoroughly recommended 👌 Roll on TWE3.

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".

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.

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.

This one is better than the first movie, which is very rare these days. The story lines are great. Although there are some plots that do not make a lot sense, it doesn't affect the overall rating at all. It doesn't make me feel it's a 3hr movie at all. This is actually the best Si-Fi movie I have watched in the last 3 years (and I've watched a lot lol) and I think it's fair to say it's better than 70% of the Hollywood Si-Fi movies these days.

I'm looking forward to the third one now given there are some flash forward scenes hinting at the next story line. Also, don't miss the credits at the end. I left early and have to read up on the end credit scenes online afterwards.