I’m liking the sound of the new $700m Chinese science-fiction epic movie, The Wandering Earth. A three-star review (three of five) in the latest Sci-fi Now magazine made me realise that this way-too-long-awaited movie had actually been released at long last. That’s the problem with too much hype too early, something also seen happening with the H.P. Lovecraft game The Sinking City for the last year. That game will probably be very good when released (it’s from the guys who made the superb Sherlock Holmes games, but this time they’re doing Lovecraft). But once the actual release happens many have long since switched off their attention for it, due to the years of vapid hype for something not yet available. I’m thinking that there’s a market for a magazine or website that only covers new stuff that’s actually released and fully complete, as a huge time-saver for busy people.

Anyway, Sci-fi Now talks of “the irony-free bombast of the whole thing”, and describes The Wandering Earth as “a gigantic, ludicrous over the-top disaster movie” — making it sound like a Chinese Independence Day. Great. That, and “irony-free”, is a very good thing in my book. Some other reviews (skimmed, to avoid plot spoilers) grudgingly admit it’s good romping save-the-world heroic entertainment. But one often gets the impression the reviewer feels that it’s not politically-correct or career-advancing to be seen to like such ‘gung-ho / can-do’ stories of sentimental heroism.

Despite the movie being slammed by IndieWire as “unwatchable” and unceremoniously dumped on Netflix with no publicity at all, one intelligent review confirms another reason for my interest it it. Its sheer difference from Hollwood pap such as the dire new Godzilla…

The Wandering Earth is a breath of fresh air. Its basic assumptions are sufficiently different from those of a Hollywood film that this increases our enjoyment of all the surprising turns, while making us think about the way in which certain civilisational differences can lead to new forms of artistic expression.

The characters in The Wandering Earth are engineers, workers of physical reality. Pleasure for them will come after their work is done. The Western viewer may be surprised that the movie contains no hint whatsoever of romantic or erotic interests.

Sounds even better, then. Proper sci-fi adventure, and not contorted by adding ‘love interest’. Johnny Depp’s awful nanotech sci-fi movie Transcendence (2014) was a prime example of that destroying a movie. There’s also that tedious new mode of… “We need to repeatedly bring the action to a grinding halt for eight minutes, to Talk Deeply About Our Feelings”, as seen in the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and the early series of Game of Thrones (until they got a bit more action-oriented).

It’s said that the American-English dub for The Wandering Earth significantly shifts the characterisation toward camp cheesiness, and also is rather American. Thus presumably the subtitled version is the one to try to watch the first time around, even though the vocal shadings will be lost (social class, emotional overtones etc) on a Westerner. Then see the English dub as one’s later ‘second viewing’ of the movie.