Seventeen years later, in 2075, Liu Peiqiang is set to return to Earth after the Chinese New Year. His son Liu Qi, now an adult, obtains fake IDs and stolen thermal suits from criminal gangs and "borrows" his grandfather's clearance pass to take his foster sister, Han Duoduo, to requisition a heavy transport vehicle to see the surface. Both are arrested at a nearby checkpoint and get jailed, meeting another prisoner, Tim. Han Zi'ang attempts to bribe an official for the release of his grandchildren, but is himself arrested. As Earth approaches its gravity assist around Jupiter, a spike in tidal force causes devastating earthquakes that disable many Earth Engines and sets the planet on a collision course with Jupiter.
Zhuoyi Wang, an associate professor at Hamilton College, lauded the film's attempt in presenting a unifying view of humanity that imagines humans from diverse backgrounds coming together to save the earth from a disaster. In contrast, the film's Hollywood counterparts often feature a group of individuals from a single country or a single social class. Despite its attempted departure from the exclusionist individualism prevalent in Hollywood, The Wandering Earth has nevertheless received support from Chinese state media for nationalist reasons, leading many to dismiss it as an instrument of Chinese propaganda or a Hollywood clone.[47]
The story is based on a novella by Liu Cixin and it is set in a future society where the sun has aged and the Earth is in danger of losing its axis and source of light and power. In response the nations of the Earth band together to create United Earth Government and cities exist underground where oxygen and temperature can be monitored. They create a plan to use giant rockets on the earth to boost it out of orbit and move it over 2,500 years to a new galaxy with a new sun. A scientist at the beginning of the film named Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing) goes up into space to lead the International Space station which is now responsible for navigating the Earth on its journey to the new galaxy.
"The Wandering Earth" is based on a short story with the same name by Liu Cixin, China's top Chinese science-fiction writer and the first in China to win the prestigious Hugo Award. It takes place in a future on the brink of apocalypse, where the dying sun threatens to extinguish all life on earth. The United World Government opts for an audacious plan to physically move the entire planet to orbit a safer, distant star.
"Taking the planet with us on the interstellar journey is a plot different from the Hollywood model of 'escaping from earth.' It manifests the deeply-rooted attachment to the family and homeland in Chinese culture," said Wang Yichuan, dean of the School of Arts, Peking University.
The main storyline is this: to save humans from annihilation with an expanding sun, a United Environment Government, the UN-like body in the movie, set on a path to jet off earth from the solar system.
Bit of a background explanation:
After the redesign of the space station made by the director's team during the shoot, they were able to add Wu Jing to the actors. Which meant that the space station sequence had to be boosted in length and importance. So the space station model that they had was not adequate anymore, and they came back to our team to make sure the details would be believable.
The plot needed escape pods able to fly out of the space station and get back to earth if needed.
The director really wanted to give them the feel of portable hard drive, so I mixed a space shuttle feel to a very boxy shape, trying my best to make sense of the design.
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Additionally, a distinct characteristic of the movie was its strong sense of diversity and unity. Typically, most blockbuster disaster films feature the US single-handedly saving the world from imminent disaster. However, The Wandering Earth II explores a more collective and unified perspective by showing the world banding together to overcome the issue. Since the movie uses subtitles, the characters all spoke their own languages. The movie featured many countries working together to solve the conflict, which helped make the film more realistic and down-to-earth compared to the typical trope that one individual or country saves the entire world.
The movie, its sci-fi aesthetics, its dramatic plot and its bombastic soundscape not only bring to mind a strong Hollywood genre style, they also conjure up memories of a host of Hollywood sci-fi successes, particularly the 1998 release Armageddon with Bruce Willis in the leading role. This movie features a Texas-size asteroid that is predicted to collide with planet earth in eighteen days. While I was watching The Wandering Earth in a Beijing cinema, I was also thinking about this earlier version and about how in general I considered science fiction a Hollywood-inflected genre. I felt somehow guilty for this denial of coevalness, for positioning the Chinese movie as a late and seriously delayed translation of a Hollywood blockbuster. And I was not alone. Indeed, both within and outside China, The Wandering Earth has been criticized as a rather soulless imitation of Hollywood. In the New York Times, Ben Keningburg (2019) wrote:
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