The Wandering Earth

This is China’s attempt at a big scale sci-fi blockbuster, and it’s got a very big scale premise – in the face of an expanding sun, the governments of the earth unite for a project that will shoot the planet out in search of a more accommodating solar system. Seventeen years into the trip, as the Earth is about to pass Jupiter, unexpected gravitational forces mean the mission is under terrible jeopardy, and one Chinese family is stuck in the middle of it all trying to survive and prevent planetary disaster. IF that sounds like one of the nuttiest ideas ever from the team of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (the nutcases behind Day after Tomorrow, 2012 and Geostorm), congratulations, you have the tone pretty much down – although here, of course, it’s the Chinese who are going to save humanity rather than the Americans. But there’s still a whole massed serving of blockbuster cheese and grand spectacle along with dubious science and just a soupcon of propaganda. As stupidity goes, this is reasonable, but it never quite glories in the insanity of the premise so much as delivers a competent but not especially exciting standard issue blockbuster.