During the Chinese New Year, I watched The Wandering Earth alone, because there was a fair amount of uncertainty and I didn’t dare recommend it to others first and have them take the risk.
But in that unease, watching this film gave me a huge shock, and also filled me with anticipation for the future.
When I booked the ticket, I was going for Liu Cixin. I lowered my expectations—after all, it had been adapted for film, and as long as it wasn’t cringeworthy, it would count as a success! After watching it, I thought: this is a good movie, worth recommending.
It can’t be benchmarked against Cameron’s Avatar, nor is it enough to benchmark against The Lord of the Rings, but it’s roughly a notch above 2012, on par with The Martian. Not bad, I’d say. It simplifies the adaptation to tell one point rather than the whole surface of the novel. Just talking about the film here. Lower your expectations and you can go see it. Maybe it’s a bit weaker than Interstellar in terms of its mind-blowing premise. But readers of Da Liu have seen a lot of things that can be slotted in to fill out the worldview, and then it can stand on par with Interstellar. This film is a first test of the waters. There actually aren’t many big scenes—not as satisfying as a popcorn flick like The Avengers—but it’s definitely not cheap-ass special effects.
However, the film adaptation is very restrained, with a certain degree of emphasis on humanization, different from Da Liu’s novels, which are extremely cold. This film is more like “sacrifice the small self, achieve the greater good, choose hope,” whereas the Da Liu in my heart is the spokesperson for that cold universe—the one who says “lose your humanity and you lose much, lose your animal nature and you lose everything” and “physically speaking, there’s no essential difference between a person dying and ice melting.” After all, it’s a test of the waters; the first film can’t be that hardcore, especially for a Chinese New Year’s Day family reunion slot—better to play it safe. It’s perfectly reasonable.
“Navigator, ahead three!” —This is only the beginning. In this lifetime, I’ll wait for that moment of “Natural Selection, ahead four” with tears in my eyes.