Frant Gwo's “THE WANDERING EARTH II”
Review by Dennis D. McDonald
This is a prequel to The Wandering Earth. Here we see Chinese-led international efforts to blast the earth out of its orbit in the midst of social unrest and conflict between those who support digitizing human memories and those who would rather blast the earth out of the solar system.
We know from the first film that the latter group won. Here we witness a massive series of disastrous cliffhangers punctuated by jaw-dropping special effects and extraordinarily detailed robotics, hardware, and technology. Interspersed are human vignettes of tragedy, sentimentality, sacrifice, fear, the by-now-standard ugly American, and ticking-bomb suspense.
As with the first film, one must put one’s brain on hold to accept the story and its echoes—albeit spectacular—of other sci-fi and disaster films. Amazing and detailed vistas of on- and off-earth events are fun to watch, at least initially. But too many cliffhanger episodes of red-wire-blue-wire-type suspense take a toll that eventually threaten to overwhelm the film’s final attempts at sentimentality and humanity.
Review copyright (c) 2023 by Dennis D. McDonald
