When Frant Gwo’s The Wandering Earth landed in 2019, it created a colossal cultural imprint – both China and the world’s fifth highest-grossing non-English film of all time, described by some as the country’s first contact with true blockbuster spectacle. James Cameron’s influence upon Gwo is clear, with the two even sharing the contract work of Weta Workshop on their respective films, but Cameron’s shoot-for-the-stars filmmaking gusto echoes through Gwo’s follow-up that undeniably goes much, much bigger.
Despite the 2 in the title, The Wandering Earth II serves as a prequel to the events of its predecessor, elaborating upon events and milestones in the history of Gwo’s world that led to The Wandering Earth project. The story is framed through a triptych of perspectives – the boots-on-the-ground soldier Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing, reprising his role), computer scientist Tu Hengyu (Andy Lau), and Chinese ambassador to the UN Zhou Zhezhi (Li Xuejian). Gwo works cyclically, showing us the impossible destruction that various crises like the Space Elevator Crisis through Peiqiang’s heroism, and how both government and science respond to such attacks both internally and on an international scale whilst the burden of the Earth’s inevitable demise looms over them.
Many films often are critiqued for their under-cooked story – The Wandering Earth II, on the other hand, is so overcooked you might burn your finger on it. In its three-length, it unloads a herculean epic of a narrative, flying through crises, disasters and decades like a knife through butter. Such a tidal wave of storytelling inevitably becomes exhausting – there are so many threads to grab onto that you’ll just have to let go of them, and try and piece them together through what you do understand. It’s essentially like cutting into a croissant – there are so many layers that’re uncovered that you sometimes struggle to fully understand all of them.
One thing that isn’t hard to understand though is what The Wandering Earth II is – and that is the mother of all blockbusters. Move over Avatar 2, this is true cinematic spectacle cranked up to 11, and straight up ripping the dial off. Where many Hollywood blockbusters would build up to their One Big Set Piece, The Wandering Earth II is all Big Set Pieces, baby. Glimpses of 10,000 gunships being annihilated out of the sky by impossibly large sentry cannons, hordes of extras hustling and bustling through a space base as humungous elevators fall from the sky and creating cataclysmic craters.
The filmmaking never, ever feels boring as Gwo and cinematographer Michael Liu continually shake things up – this is supercharged action of the highest order, and it feels absolutely amazing to watch unfold. There’s a chaotic dynamism that feels just the right level of insanity, the camera flying through the space, pushing and pulling to grip us tightly to our seats whilst Peiqiang fights a Vin Diesel-lookalike in zero gravity whilst plummeting down to Earth inside a space elevator (yes, you read that right). Its outer space sequences are comparable to Alfonso Cuaron’s achievements with Gravity – there’s such a physical, ephemeral nature to them that a small part of your brain is truly tricked into thinking there is somehow a camera on the moon.
The issue with its infinitely-sprawling narrative and uber-blockbuster spectacle is that we don’t feel as though Peiqiang, Hengyu and Zhezhi ever advance beyond our initial introductions to them. The story happens to them, and they merely react to it rather than allowing it to reshape them, affected and changed by their encounters. It could be argued that their constancy as the Lovable Hero, the Anti-Hero and the Leader are necessary North Stars to anchor viewers through the lightspeed retelling of the Wandering Earth Project, but it leaves you with a lack of care of their fates beyond a brief ‘oh, that’s a shame’.
That’s not to say there aren’t attempts to deepen our connection with them – Peiqiang’s subplot involving his sick wife Han Duoduo (Wang Zhi) does pull at the heartstring in a rare moment of slow tranquility. It feels like a brief reprieve for Peiqiang before he’s put through, arguably, the worst decade of his entire life where he is instrumental in saving the entire planet – he needs a little moment to himself! Hengyu’s complicated relationship with his deceased daughter-turned-virtual AI is certainly the most intriguing story of the bunch, but I think it’s precisely because this is a bunch of stories that one struggles to stand out above the rest. The Wandering Earth II is a mighty complex machine made up of many moving parts, and some are just going to work better than others.
It’s hard to deny that Gwo’s follow-up is anything short of impossibly spectacular, and will blow you off your seat straight into space. Its bombastic visual flair and brilliantly playful filmmaking give it a charm and playfulness that’s reminiscent of Cameron’s True Lies or Terminator 2, it just needs some reigning in to hone its characters and make us fall in love with them, then we might be able to discuss the possibility of Frant Gwo as a worthy rival to the King of Blockbusters himself.
The Wandering Earth II was released in UK cinemas on January 27th
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