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Opinion
China’s blockbuster The Wandering Earth has a message: collective action tops individual freedom in times of crisis
- Audrey Jiajia Li says that, unlike in hit US films, Chinese cinema’s latest sci-fi movie lacks individual heroes, and the focus on group effort to resolve crises reflects the country’s response to a century of hardship
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Audrey Jiajia Li is a veteran Chinese journalist currently based in Singapore.
I didn’t rush to the cinema when The Wandering Earth, hailed as China’s first big-budget science fiction thriller, premiered during the Lunar New Year holiday. As it stars actor Wu Jing, I had seen quite a few comments putting it in the same category as the nationalistic The Wolf Warrior, in which Wu played a superhero who violently battled Western villains.
When I finally watched the film during the second weekend in February, it was already dominating Chinese social media, its daily gross sales had been climbing each day for almost a week and many believed it could eventually surpass Wolf Warrior 2’s stunning US$854 million record. Interestingly, compared with Wolf Warrior, The Wandering Earth is brilliantly patriotic but nowhere near as xenophobic and chauvinistic.
Adapted from sci-fi author (and China’s first Hugo award winner) Liu Cixin’s short story, The Wandering Earth lays out a futuristic crisis in which the sun is about to expand into a red giant and devour the Earth, and the world’s governments must unite to strap thrusters onto the planet, ejecting it out into the universe in search of a new home. The film then portrays how a group of intrepid astronauts, soldiers and scientists bravely avert a collision with Jupiter and save the world from annihilation.
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