Movies: The Wandering Earth

 

(Drivebycuriosity) -  Cixin Liu is a rising star in the science fiction universe. In 2015 the Chinese author recieved the Hugo Award,for his novel "The Three Body Problem" which I enjoyed very much (here my review ). This drew my attention to the Chinese scifi movie "The Wandering Earth", which is now running in some US cinema theaters (Mandarin with English subtitles  imdb). The film, which is one of the biggest grossing movies in Chinese history, is based on Liu`s same named novella.

The movie starts with the announcement that the sun is inflating and will swallow the whole solar system and therefore destroy the earth. Rising emissions from the sun are already heating up our planet and are causing many catastrophes. Scientists develop a plan to move the earth out of our sun system and transfer it close to another sun which is 4 light years away, a massive project which  of course causes huge problems (this is a spoiler free problem. You can read a synopsis here  wikipedia ).

 

The movie is wildly imaginative and a gigantic spectacle on an epic scale but based on a lot of physics and logical thinking - real hard science fiction. It is well known that the sun will expand some far away day and turn into a red star. Cixin Liu took just the freedom to transfer our sun´s expiration date into a much nearer future and speculates then what humans could do by using scientific knowledge and advanced engineering.

John W. Campbell, the editor of the influential science fiction magazine Analog, described scifi as "a problem solving medium” (driveby). The film represents the can-do thinking which once characterized American science fiction - the golden age. It seems that Chinese scifi reached a golden age as well. At least "The Wandering Earth" reflects the rising popularity of scifi in China, apparently the genre is there much more popular than in the US (china-science-fiction ). Science fiction is even supported by the Chinese government in order to improve the population’s scientific literacy. (scmp). I get the impression that the rise of Chinese scifi signals a general belief in progress & in technology which existed in America in the 1950s and 1960s when John F. Kennedy initiated the Apollo moon landing program.

I was impressed by the film´s aesthetic. The producers created spectacular tableaus with bizarre fictional landscapes and an elaborate and often massive utopian infrastructure. "Wandering Earth" is cutting edge scifi cinema from which Hollywood could learn from.