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.