Review: The Wandering Earth (2019)

Wandering Earth is currently the best-selling movie of 2019 – but you probably haven’t heard of it. The box office intake is almost entirely centralized to China itself – but due to the size of that market alone, it has become the second-most successful foreign language film of all time. Wandering Earth is part of an increasingly successful, yet self-contained, mainstream Chinese cinema.

This is noted as the first successful Chinese sci-fi blockbuster – but that doesn’t really mean much for artistic value. This film runs off pure, dumb energy like any other generic sci-fi spectacle piece – it simply happens to be Chinese this time.

Wandering Earth is absurd in its scope. The sun is beginning to enter the red giant phase, and our collective solution is to attach thrusters and push the entire planet somewhere else. Along the way, we attempt to use Jupiter’s gravitational pull to slingshot us through space, but there’s naturally a miscalculation that puts the planet on a direct trajectory into disintegrative doom.

In other words, this leans more on the fiction than the science.

The film bounces between two locations. Astronaut Liu Peiqiang is aboard a space station that guides the planet, soon finding himself in combination 2001–Gravity land as he must dodge space debris and confront a killer A.I. Meanwhile, his family on Earth gets caught up in a rescue mission, which falls hard into the epic disaster genre, specifically recalling The Day After Tomorrow with its frozen metropolises. These bits are all painfully familiar, and I can’t decide whether it’s more rip-off or an attempt at pastiche for China’s first project of this scale.

Despite its rather lacking scientific basis, Wandering Earth sure enjoys spending a lot of time trying to make sense of everything. Like Alita, this is a film that gets sidetracked explaining concepts that really don’t matter for its purpose. There are a few cool moments that would hopefully balance things out, but where Alita has a director who at least understands raw action spectacle, there’s not enough here. The only truly stand-out imagery from this film comes in the form of shots of Earth as it is pushed through space by its thousands of blue jets, leaving a trail in its wake.

The central concept is too nonsensical to really drive itself, and the characters are also lacking. Liu Peiqiang and his son Liu Qi have been separated for seventeen years, and their drive to reunite seems to serve as a central personal conflict. Qi is angry for a variety of reasons, but it all seems so shallow when the world itself is on the verge of evaporation. Qi has his grandfather and an adoptive sister along for the ride, but neither offer much besides familial relations – an idea that frequently pops up throughout the film as government propaganda encourages people to spend their last moments alive with their loved ones.

They are surrounded by characters who don’t do much but die – I get the feeling they were going for the group protagonist angle as typical of films from countries that try to push communist themes, but it makes for a rather bland cinematic experience. The one side character who stands out in any meaningful way is Tim, an Australian-Chinese man who serves as comic relief…who is implied to be a rapist. For comedic purposes.

If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the day where even more countries push out works like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, then Wandering Earth must be an exciting prospect. But all this really represents is a country with a big enough economy and population that it can create its own insular Hollywood – it will take a certain amount of time before they can push out a truly unique and international success. It’s a Hollywood disaster flick with a Chinese flavor – there might be some cultural differences in its message, but it’s not competent enough to really be saying much at all.

2 Stars Out of 5

Review: How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)

The third film in the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, The Hidden World captures a lot of what made the first two movies the best animated films out of Dreamworks this decade. But is retreading the same ground enough to make this a good film in its own right?

My praise for The Hidden World would be very similar to that of the previous films – firstly, the animation is phenomenal. The series pushes more realistic character designs while maintaining a cartoonish charm, avoiding the uncanny and offering dozens of stunning sights. Each character has their own distinct design, yet they fit perfectly side by side. The Hidden World‘s greatest strength over its predecessors is five years of visual evolution.

What’s always striking about this series (and DeBlois’s earlier Lilo and Stitch) is how it manages to capture character among non-human figures – a ton of effort is poured into getting Toothless’s animations just right, giving him perhaps the most vibrancy of any character despite an inability to speak.

A central focus of this movie is Toothless meeting a female member of his species that the humans nickname Light Fury. A great scene on the beach finds Toothless attempting to woo her, invoking childish moves and odd Birds of Paradise-inspired dances. These details establish Toothless as an awkward young adult much like Hiccup.

Which, the relationship between Hiccup and Toothless is the guiding force of the series – and I’d say this is where The Hidden World falters a bit. The film does reach similar emotional heights to the first two entries, but a lot is saved for the ending.

Where the first two films speak of learning the language of a supposed enemy and coexistence, The Hidden World deals with separation. Hiccup and Toothless have formed an almost symbiotic relationship over the series, but The Hidden World gives Toothless his own personal pursuits. While this provides a strong inner conflict for Hiccup, it disrupts the screen time between the leads.

Where The Hidden World is a largely satisfying conclusion to a trilogy, its central conflict doesn’t do enough do raise the stakes from the previous. The villain is largely forgettable and is notably less threatening, and most of the characters lack an arc or real development – despite the distinct designs, the side characters offer little but comic relief. This is an excuse to revisit the familiar more than being an expansion on the lore.

Luckily, this is a world worth revisiting. For those invested in the series, it will hit you hard at key moments. Despite being about mythical creatures, How to Train Your Dragon has always felt like the story of a boy and his dog. The Hidden World pushes past that, instead paralleling old friends who you know someday will go their own way. Toothless is never subservient but an equal, and this entry explores what that means as the two enter maturity.

As such, The Hidden World is a stellar conclusion to a great series, but one that doesn’t quite have as much impact on its own. The narrative beats land a bit flat during the second act, but this is balanced out with quieter stakes from the earlier installments. How much you get from this depends entirely on how invested you are in the series as a whole.

3.5 Stars Out of 5

Review: Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Alita: Battle Angel is a tale of an abandoned cyborg returned to life without her memories, finding herself in a ruined world beneath a floating city. It’s got all the features of a major studio blockbuster – big action sequences, a vibrant future noir world, an obligatory romance.

After months of staring this trailer down, I feel like I have to look it in the eye. It’s the most jarring detail, something painfully discomforting to look at. But where it turned me away from the film in the trailers, it works in the full context – it’s an intentional invocation of the uncanny valley, immediately marking Alita as out of place.

Alita: Battle Angel comes off as a film not certain of what it wants to be – it’s everything and nothing at once. Throughout the opening act, it sets itself up as if it’s going to be this classic dystopian tale with deep lore – and it really wants us to learn this lore, as the entire opening feels like nothing but exposition. But this doesn’t go anywhere – the dialogue is largely amateur, the elements of the world stale. There’s no attempt at any meaningful philosophical pondering, so why waste our time acting like there’s some grander concept at play?

Tacked onto this is a familiar love story, a young woman new to the world falling for the first young man who introduces her to it. There’s no meaningful chemistry between the two, but despite this failure, the film at least uses these moments to explore Alita as a character outside of the initial wonder and the later warrior.

After wasting our time with themes it doesn’t actually want to explore, Alita picks up the pace during the action sequences. This film is really dumb, and it’s at its best whenever it embraces that fact. It’s brutally violent and visually chaotic – that is what Rodriguez knows how to do. It’s a shame so many action directors feel a need to justify these battles – this film could have trimmed quite a bit of fat and been a much more engaging experience if it just dropped some of the political intrigue.

The one redeeming element of the narrative is Alita herself – this is a character who finds her own story, has passion and energy. These elements aren’t limited to her seeking out fights – her curiosity seems genuine, and her evolution as she begins to understand the world is largely successful. She’s alien in the right ways, making extreme gestures that are believably not as extreme from her cyborg perspective. All of this adds up to an ideal action protagonist, someone who carries the plot instead of being pushed along.

The worst part about this movie is that it ends – specifically, that it ends way before it actually ends. This is apparently going to be a story in multiple parts, as the conflict the movie keeps building toward doesn’t actually happen within the film. I felt blindsided by the credit roll – was their goal to leave the audience as immediately underwhelmed as possible? The film doesn’t do enough to leave me wanting to dive back into the narrative of this world – I just wanted a cool closing action sequence.

But the fact I wanted that means there’s some success – this is a movie that got better as it went on, to the point I must have been invested by the end. Between the lead character and the visual design, a sequel could turn out a lot better since it gets to skip over the set-up.

All in all, Alita: Battle Angel perfectly encapsulates the styles of both Rodriguez and James Cameron. There’s chaotic violence, a bold new world…and a consistently fumbled plot. If you can tolerate the sometimes maddening narrative, you’ll be rewarded with some truly fun action sequences.

3 Stars Out of 5

Review: Fyre (2019)

The failure of the Fyre Festival was one of those spectacular social media events, a cavalcade of schadenfreude as we collectively laughed as rich kids overreacted to a bad vacation. It was symbolic of issues within social media, an event carried entirely by hype and no outside oversight, sold through ‘influencers,’ with no one questioning who was running it and if they had ever done something similar before. Fyre dives into the background details, pinpointing the people involved and why it went wrong.

Being a documentary about recent events that are still tangled in legal issues and interviewing people who may or may not be culpable, Fyre is a film that needs to be met with heavy scrutiny – who is making this and what are they trying to say? If you went purely off this documentary as presented, everything seems to fall on CEO Billy McFarland, that rich white frat bro-type seemingly designed to be hated. He obviously is a central negative force – but an event this big has several people involved, and no one seemed to do anything meaningful to prevent the disaster from being fully realized. There was no excuse to allow people to actually arrive at the festival grounds.

What Fyre fails to meaningfully establish is that this was a scam created by rich people targeting rich people. The documentary casually introduces attendees, and they are never questioned. Who are these people that are willing to drop thousands of dollars on a festival without first making sure it was the real thing – especially one occurring in 2017 with Blink-182 as a headliner? These aren’t sympathetic figures, but Fyre is happy to drop successful venture capitalists in front of us and act like they’re everyday victims.

As long as you go in with a critical mind, Fyre does a pretty good job establishing what allowed this to happen – even if some people might be covering their own tails, there are solid elements being discussed, like how they managed such expert marketing and the struggles of attempting to put together a big event in such a short time. There were promises of something that had never been done before, with no one thinking to ask why it hadn’t been done before. This was a concept being sold as a finished product. There’s quite a bit of fun in seeing people who can usually buy their way out of every problem running into something that no amount of money can fix.

The film is at its strongest when it exposes the actual victims at the heart of the matter – as in people who were actually harmed by the festival. Interviews with the locals who did the actual ground work are depressing, people promised something meaningful for their community and then abandoned without pay. This would be a stronger documentary if they gave this subject more time – but Fyre seems to want to run off the more absurd elements.

The Fyre Festival is certainly an event worthy of a cinematic exploration, but this film is coming at a time where it allows certain people to save face – it’s hard to view it as a meaningful statement until the dust settles. It’s certainly a fun subject matter presented fashionably, but the film itself is teaching us not to trust presentations simply because they have a slick presentation. A fuller truth will be revealed in time – but this is a fair summary as we have it today.

3 Stars Out of 5