★ 6 / 10
Now then, it's best - I think
CinemaSerf
Now then, it's best - I think - to just accept that there is very, very, little plausible science to this save-the-planet movie. The format, and the story…
Now then, it's best - I think - to just accept that there is very, very, little plausible science to this save-the-planet movie. The format, and the story, have oft been done by Hollywood before so it's not top of the originality tree either - but it's still quite a watchable and well produced story of a group of Chinese trainees who must raise their game when they find themselves trying to save the infrastructure being built to help save the planet from terrorists. It's extremely perilous for them, their enemy is sophisticated and well entrenched. When the moon becomes unstable, it again falls to them to stop it crashing into the Earth before a carefully placed series of thousands of engines around the globe can be activated to propel us all out of danger and off to a new orbit around Alpha Centauri. The acting talents and the dialogue are really neither here nor there, but the visual effects - especially at the start - are effective and the pace of the film is as times entertaining as this dedicated team - and others from around the world - must unite to thwart the unseen enemy and rescue mankind before it's all too late. It really does need shortening though. It could lose an hour and - tightened up - have a much more focussed and impactful storyline that would hold the attention just as well as any Western equivalents. It does need a big screen to get the best from the creativity of the visuals but students of physics (astro or otherwise) may blush at some of it!
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★ 4 / 10
The Wandering Earth II or the "wandering script
MovieGuys
The Wandering Earth II or the "wandering script", as I call it, does nothing to improve upon a proposition that failed to work, the first time around. Its…
The Wandering Earth II or the "wandering script", as I call it, does nothing to improve upon a proposition that failed to work, the first time around.
Its alright to create a space saga but trying to cram the whole thing down the audiences throat in two sittings, is simply too much to ask. My wife, who is Chinese, became exasperated about half an hour in and I don't blame her.
There are simply too many disparate things going on at once, for this film to present anything, even a highly switched on viewer, like my economist other half, can reasonably follow.
What you are left with, is what amounts to mini films, that feel like little like extended trailers, cobbled together over an lengthy time line, that become so diffuse, as to loose the potential to represent any semblance of a comprehensible "whole".
Graphics are admittedly amazing, as are some of the sci fi conceptualisations. Acting's mostly pretty decent, too. That said, what are these elements without clarity of storytelling?
In summary, best described as an overly ambitious, ill considered "sci fi, hot mess" that's clearly had a lot of time and money invested in it. If this had been broken down into smaller, bite sized films with less crammed in, I think it could have worked, a lot better.
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★ 6 / 10
The Meandering Earth
agof
English subtitles by Coleen Chua I barely remember The Wandering Earth. It was a poorly told complete mess of dated comedy and cheap overly dramatic drama.…
English subtitles by Coleen Chua
I barely remember The Wandering Earth. It was a poorly told complete mess of dated comedy and cheap overly dramatic drama. Good thing The Wandering Earth 2 is actually The Wandering Earth 0. I bet there is intertextuality and references to the original film, that i've missed. But this being a prequel means it's a new independent story that starts right here.
Watching this feels like reading Foundation a bunch of disparate anecdotes on the given topic.
It starts as an Emmerich disaster epic with tired comedy and a lot of CGI destruction. It's like Don't Look Up, where commie party of zhonghua has saved the world in a jackpot chain of last second lucky rolls. The digital life project, and its terrorist supporters are stupid. This is not Diaspora, the entirety of humankind is still stuck in the solar system, and the movie says that the sun will soon burn everything to a crisp. This is just digital suicide. They even have the evidence of what will happen, when sun destroys all digital life on the moon.
When they finally decided to continue building the engines, the film jumps through years in a montage. And then the mood switches from Emmerich to overly dramatic drama drama. That is effective with its cinematography. But this is still a movie where literally everything literally always literally goes literally wrong in the last second, only to be fixed in the laster second. Don't worry if the timer shows 00:00, there's always overtime. A nuclear blast fireball behind you will wait for 10 seconds so you can deliver your speech. People who love cheap drama and don't care for the plot can probably enjoy this film immensely.
While this film is more coherent than the original, they still have introduced a ton of unneeded garbage that makes everything dumber. First of all they show how HAL9000 ruins everything for the whole run-time, decades before it was even created. It literally didn't exist when it orchestrated all the bad things. Second, there is some 70 years old prophecy that predicted everything that HAL9000 did decades before it was created. They show that nonsense three times, and i don't remember it being present in the second film, which it predicted in this one. This film tries to build tension with its cinematography, but besides it being a prequel, the countdown subtitles literally reveal plot-points hours before they happen. Like, oh noes who will reboot the router if there's nobody home? Don't worry the text on screen already said that internet will be rebooted in 30 minutes.
So they hired real english- and russian-speaking voice actors (maybe also for other languages) but they didn't explain to one of them the plot, so he read 550w as 550 watt.
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It's a good movie but it just irks me how so many people just go along with governments going full authoritarian and the movie portrays it in a rather positive light. I mean I know te movie has the CCP's stamp of approval, but it's still a hard pill to swallow.