Watched The Wandering Earth 2 at the cinema. The Chinese were able to surprise

The main Chinese novelty of 2023, The Wandering Earth 2, has appeared in the Russian box office.

This is the second part of a trilogy launched back in 2019. It’s amazing how the authors landed on a short story by Chinese favorite Liu Cixin. He has become one of the world’s main science fiction writers over the past ten years.

Cixin is the recipient of the prestigious annual Hugo Book Award, which honors the best science fiction treasures. He also became one of the producers of the pictures.

The Disaster Movie We Deserve

Making a truly high-quality disaster film is a whole task. Not all directors cope with it, focusing on the same genre clichés.

What is the movie about: The sun is fading. Humanity’s last chance for salvation is the search for a new home. By uniting, people have the opportunity to change the orbit of the Earth, going into the unknown. But this is a journey through many hundreds of light years in a time of destruction and chaos.

The planet is torn apart by cataclysms, in which not everyone will survive. Yet it is only in the infinite void that new life can be found.

Directed by Frant Gvo faced a difficult task. It is required to create a full-fledged cinema universe for a short story. Thanks to the competent selection of screenwriters, he succeeded almost on the level of Peter Jackson with The Hobbit.

Only now, if in the case of Jackson the stake was made on a well-developed history, then here they focus on the scale of the normal as a whole, but do not forget about the cinematic universe.

From the first minute it is clear that the authors decided delve into local history about the Earth’s journey through the dark recesses of space. After all, this is necessary, first of all, in order to save the planet and by itself be realized from destruction and anomalous cataclysms.

The most important task was to show the fate of people. There are a lot of characters in the picture, but there are three main plot branches. Each infection has its own hero and each has its own development.

Throughout history, heroes observe not only world events and catastrophic destruction, but also personal tragedies. There were deaths here, on which a big bet is made. The director literally puts pressure on emotions, which is why some scenes are perceived hard. Particularly impressionable, ready – to constantly put pressure on your head with the heaviest load.

The director himself described the process of creating characters as follows:

The Wandering Earth 2 is about characters and emotions, and it is necessary to create a context, construct a picture of the world, rework the images of manifestations, show their evolution, trace their lives over time. The screenwriter had to implement the whole plot, it’s like growing plots: they take root and grow, you need soil.

Only in this way it was possible to observe the development of events and identify them in conclusion. The picture of the world in cinema can be realized with the help of some phrase of the character, movement, but without details the character will not turn out to be meaningful.

However, there are downsides to the novelty. Despite the deepest elaboration, there are also a large number of frankly redundant scenes and dialogues, which, if they expand the images of the characters, then only by 1%. Very authors and make provisions for flashback inserts that do not include anything but beautiful pictures. So, for example, often happens with the sharp memories of one of the main characters, Liu Peiqiang.

Another point that also puzzled me is that in the process of mass use, inserts with spoilers? For example, “20 minutes before the explosion of the moon” or “7 days before the first start of the engines.” We are told literally the exact text of what will happen next. And this is a strange decision.

However, personally, due to the large timing, I got the impression that such inserts are made just to keep you informed. After all, there are many events, and among them it is easy to get lost. And since a lot of time passes between the infinite unification, you are already leaving some of them to forget.

This is an incredibly big movie.

Gigantism is what the authors from the Middle Kingdom possess in this operation. They constantly develop within the frames of the largest structures and compare them on the scale of a portfolio of people.

You can literally feel for yourself how huge everything is: from combat drones you will bring the ISS. And graphically it’s all done at a high level.

Sometimes I got the impression that I was seeing an expensive blockbuster from Michael Bay with a lot of explosions and cool graphics. And then data on budget pictures and amazing … everything was revealed $90 million. A looks like a $200 million!

The soundtrack was composed by composer Rock Chen, known for the films “Pirate Avatar”, “Escape from the Jungle”, “Payback” and many other films. He has more than 80 paintings on his account, so he does not have to deal with experience. And it introduced itself. He knows how to create dramatic music, and incredibly epic.

Long but worth it

To be honest, The Wandering Earth 2 is action-packed and emotional, but it lacks a more truncated running time. Still, you can’t sit in the cinema for 3 hours every time.

However, we have a really high-quality movie that attracts more and more attention every minute. Onono’s method is both individual and reproduced on emotions.

And, most importantly, it can be watched without realizing the essential parts. Why? Yes, because we have a prequel. And after that, you can pay attention to the sequel from 2019.