The Wandering Earth

Definitely do not travel light. Take your whole world with you. Over the top, wacky idea of spaceship earth in the most literal sense becomes a film as it premiere to the chinese audience during the Chinese New Year.

it is grandiose to the romantic scale, reminding viewers of the touch of Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky and Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, the film returns science fiction canvas in cinema to a scale that break free from the American's super hero obsession. Yes there are no super humans to perform out of this world deeds to save the world, only the human will and spirit expressed in other world scale of architecture and military-industrial aesthetics. The architecture of the world engine, the underground city and the space station all lean towards a Russian constructivist vision of man over machine instead of the scale of individualism in the dominant super hero movies. In fact, with the passing of Stan Lee, the super hero is depleting ideas for true science fiction discourse through the cinematic image. The rendezvour with Jupiter is mirroring the same destination with 2001 A Space Odyssey and yet the encounter has to do with a mind over matter operatives instead of an unveiling of mystery: the big red spot. Jupiter is used as a giant gas engine instead of the harbouring of mysterious artificial intelligent life form that engulf entire planet as in the sequel of 2001: 2010. It seems that the sun and Jupiter is the gate keeper of the solar systems in both story. Symbolically the Sun is God incarnated, and Jupiter is the secular Greek God of Zeus. In order for the human species to evolve pass a certain critical point in the civilisation, travelling out of the solar system is an indicator. Now to have man made spaceships doing that seems the logical development of technology available to human, yet to take the whole planet along the trip is a form of thinking outside the box, no matter how outrageous it may sound scientifically, it is bother-line on comic grandiosity, the kind of self inflated megalomanic idea that is good for laughs and yet may as well truly possible. That's the charm of the film and the idea behind, for we have enough superhero fatigue already. There is a can-do spirit and the wide eye wonder I remember when I was watching Castle in the Sky and Akira, and got all excited again with Sci Fi on the cinematic screen.