There is a large audience for science fiction in China. But until recently, the spectacular, big-budget sci-fi movies have largely been American. Chinese sci-fi fans hoped that the international success of Liu Cixin, who wrote the trilogy of books that Netflix' 3-Body Problem is based on, would naturally lead to China's first sci-fi blockbuster. However, the first try at this, an adaptation of Three Body Problem, filmed in 2015, was never released, with many (including Liu himself) explaining that it was because the VFX industry in China wasn't yet robust enough to carry the film across the finish line. However, in 2019, The Wandering Earth, based on a lesser-known short story by Liu, blew up the Chinese box office, becoming (at the time) the second-highest grossing film in the country's history – and marked what some call "year one of Chinese science fiction." While the adaptation, directed by Frant Gwo, makes drastic changes to the source material, anyone who knows Liu through the Three Body books or adaptations will recognize his hallmarks here. Planetary chaos, a story unfolding over centuries, and a unique premise: what if the sun was about to go supernova, and the only way humanity could survive was for Earth itself to escape the solar system?

What Is 'The Wandering Earth' About?

The Wandering Earth begins in a recognizable near future. Astronaut Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing, The Meg 2) prepares to leave on a long voyage to the International Space Station. This will earn him two slots in the underground bunkers being dug to protect what is left of humanity from an upcoming cataclysm. He gives these two lots to his son Qi and his father-in-law, Han Zi'ang (Ng Man-tat), traumatizing his son by choosing to sacrifice his terminally ill wife.

The film flashes forward 17 years to a time after the cataclysm has arrived. Humanity has banded together to create thousands of massive plasma engines, powerful enough to propel the planet out of its orbit around the sun. Our new "wandering earth" must escape the solar system before the sun bursts into a supernova, as is predicted to happen in a matter of centuries.

Qi (Qu Chuxiao) and his adopted younger sister Han Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai) live in a bunker beneath Shanghai. The land above is a frozen wasteland, as Earth is now nearing the outer reaches of the solar system, away from the sun's warmth. This is a significant milestone, as the plans for Earth's escape involve using the gas giant Jupiter's gravity as a slingshot out of the solar system (similarly to the gravity assist used in The Martian). Qi and Han sneak out of the bunker to witness this event from the surface — just before things start to go very badly for our planet.

'The Wandering Earth' Is a Disaster Movie Reminiscent of Roland Emmerich

Qi and Duoduo are quickly arrested for trespassing on Earth's surface. Just as their grandfather arrives to bail them out, disaster strikes. A sudden gravity spike from Jupiter pulls the Earth so close that it is now in danger of planetary collision, which – I don't know if you've seen Jupiter – is not a fight Earth will win. Worse, Jupiter's gravity is stealing away our planet's atmosphere, making it impossible for planes to fly. Qi, his family, and a ragtag group of survivors must assist a brutal military-led mission to repair the Earth's damaged plasma engines, allowing it to correct its trajectory and avoid annihilation.

Meanwhile, Liu lends assistance from the International Space Station, where a HAL-like supercomputer is eager to write our planet off as a loss and move onto Plan B, which involves repopulating a distant planet with human embryos. A very similar moral choice between humans and human seedlings was central to Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. But The Wandering Earth feels more profoundly influenced by disaster movies like Armageddon, Deep Impact, and even Independence Day, which intercut scenes of devastation on earth with a storyline set in space. The Wandering Earth, a product of current times, is more heavily reliant on CGI, and often feels artificial compared to those 90s classics.

However, The Wandering Earth stacks up well against its recent genre contemporaries, such as 2012 (which was a huge hit in China), and the dreadful Geostorm. In particular, it outshines Moonfall, the latest effort by Roland Emmerich, who directed both Independence Day and 2012, practically giving birth to this genre on his own. While Moonfall takes a similarly outrageous, heaavenly-body-anthropomorphizing premise (the moon is revealed to be the spaceship of a hostile alien being), and had a similar budget, it felt like a failed attempt to recapture 90s genre magic. The Wandering Earth feels like something new. It leans into the weightlessness of its CGI world, launching its camera from a human-level view to a planetary scale in a matter of seconds, with the speed and lightness of one of The Three Body Problem's sophons. This solves one of the age-old problems of this genre: how to tell a human story set during a global event. Contrive to place the fate of the world in the hands of your protagonists? Or just tell the story of a random few among the billions? The Wandering Earth's wild camera moves considers a new approach, making its human protagonists and planet earth itself into something resembling peers, or colleagues.

How Similar is 'The Wandering Earth' to Liu Cixin's Short Story?

The film adaptation takes very little, other than the concept, from Liu's story, which unfolds over only 40 or so pages. Anyone who's read The Three Body Problem will notice some similarities in this story, from its four-century doomsday timeline, to Liu's dividing of his alternate history into "eras," (long before Taylor Swift had the idea). Liu tells the story of one man who lives through several of these turbulent eras, a powerless victim of history who experiences one loss after another. Gwo explained that he did not find this god's eye view of history to be cinematic. Instead, he and his team of writers invented new characters and situations from scratch. In the process, they chose to focus on Earth's encounter with Jupiter, which passes by in a paragraph in the story. The story they came up with is consistently inventive, all the way through to its satisfying, if sentimental, conclusion.

There are rising tensions between the government of China and those in the West, and Liu's work is often suspected of being propaganda for the Chinese system of government. This narrative ignores the fact that his best known work contains a scene that was seen as so politically charged and risky, Liu and his publishers chose to hide them in the middle of the novel. This pivotal scene, which the Netflix adaptation places at the beginning of the story (while the Chinese series adaptation doesn't film it at all), depicts the brutal murder of a physics professor during one of the anti-intellectual show trials that characterized the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China. Surprisingly, Liu's The Wandering Earth contains a very similar scene, in which humanity loses faith in the Wandering Earth project, violently rebels, and puts its leaders on trial. Here, the scene does not contain the same historical connotations, and most bring to mind the instinctive and contagious mistrust of authority that many had during the restrictions of the COVID era.

Nothing like this happens in the film. Rather than tell a cynical story of humanity's potential for barbarism, Gwo tells an affirming story about human perseverance. The movie actually borrows a single line from the book – about humans' inability to be rational in the face of crisis – but puts it in the mouth of a cold-blooded computer confounded by humanity's capacity for hope. Gwo explained that he chose a more innocent tone because he didn't think the movie's special effects were good enough to sustain a "serious" mood (specifically comparing his movie to Interstellar). It all goes to show how tricky it can be to assume that every story choice is motivated by regional politics.

The Wandering Earth was widely perceived to be the beginning of a new era of Chinese sci-fi. In 2019, commenters on the social media page for the long-delayed 3-Body Problem movie suggested that The Wandering Earth was the movie they'd been waiting for all along. The Wandering Earth 2, a prequel, came out in 2022. Meanwhile, Chinese sci-fi fans express hope that, in the future, new voices will develop alongside Liu.

Stream The Wandering Earth on Netflix in the U.S.

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