Comment
Sophia Kalantzakos | 4.16.20
It’s easy to read a lot in the film The Wandering Earth. It’s a Chinese sci fi blockbuster of Hollywood style dimensions in which the earth is saved by the courage, self-sacrifice, and intuition of a cast of Chinese heroes. For starters and even though the storyline, visual, and sound effects are as “American” as they can get, it’s refreshing to see a non-US executed salvation of humanity. Yet, even while looking and sounding formulaic, there are still numerous interesting elements that make this movie stand out. In a time of geopolitical realignments, for instance, China has achieved superpower status and this film, in a way, celebrates its rise. Produced by the state-owned China Film Co., Ltd., Beijing Culture, G! Film and Alibaba Pictures, one steeped in geopolitical debates cannot overlook the win win state-private partnerships that made the film possible. Ties of filial piety, a longue-durée time scale given that the earth needs to travel for 2500 years (100 generations long) to its new destination, a world government that responds in French and is steered by the familiar members of the current UN security council, and a message of world collaboration in the face of adversity echo main tenants of the Chinese polity. Space station friendships between Chinese and Russian astronauts, a nod of collaborative spirit toward Japan, and the near invisibility of the US footprint in any of this would certainly strike a chord of patriotic pride within the PRC.
The story is loosely based on Liu Cixin’s book of independent novellas by the same name. Though movie scripts often borrow only elements of the story they are based on, this film- for all the emotional action – has chosen to take a mere fraction of what made the particular novella interesting. Why is the earth wandering after all? Does nobody raise the question of whether or not moving the earth into another solar system was a good idea in the first place- was it a hoax; a betrayal of humanity “fabricated by the Unity Government to bring about its dictatorial empire?” Is the sun really going to explode? Are there protests and differences of opinion among the people? In Liu Cixin’s story there are: the Spaceship Faction versus the Earth Faction- fight it out with anger, frustration and violence that culminates in outright rebellion that ends up overthrowing and killing the Unity Government for lying to the people (even though in the end what the government had said takes place). In the movie none of this matters. In fact, one cannot help but wonder if this is really a story of hope – as the movie trailer suggests. Earth has been destroyed, the surface lifeless serving only as a source of rock to be mined for fueling the engines propelling Earth to the its new home. Humanity survives. What kind of humanity? A manic kind of humanity with the usual good guys and bad guys, black markets and criminals. An overcrowded society living underground – like the miners in Zola’s Germinal coming out by special permission to fuel the engines. What does hope look like after the planet that we know as Earth has been destroyed? Maybe the film foreshadows the outcome of unbridled climate change where humanity survives at the expense of every other living thing; after all both story and film confirm that Earth had changed long before it embarked on this journey. Is it worth salvaging this kind of planet? Maybe it would have been better to be consumed by Jupiter but, in the name of humanity’s salvation and to continue the wandering to the next destination, our heroes sacrifice Noah’s Ark filled with our cultural heritage, seeds, and embryos that may have been humanity’s legacy long after it abused its home and brought upon its destruction. It seems delusional to think that Earth could ever go back to what it once was even if it makes it to Alpha Centauri. Maybe, the Wandering Earth, is just a pretty good attempt to win win the box office. In any event, for a brief moment, it gives us food for thought.
Response
Jeremy Adelman | 4.16.20
Sophia makes a good point that wanting to be a super-power requires making super-hero blockbuster, as if movies of this sort belong in the kit bag of soft-power arsenal for global muscularity. At least there were no sweaty hunks in this movie (though there was some gratuitous machine gunning of other planets; doesn’t Jupiter get some rights in this galaxy?). Sophia asks: “Does nobody raise the question of whether or not moving the earth into another solar system was a good idea in the first place?” I say: right on! I mean, how are neighboring galaxies going to feel as jet-setting Earth barges into their orbita? It seems so unfair – but isn’t that what super-powers do? They make others pay without even knowing it and then act surprised.
Growing up in Canada, I always had mixed feelings about American white-saviour flicks. Canadian movies and novels were such downers; we had no rockets, no Marines. There was the awe, the admiration, the gratitude that someone out there decked in stars and stripes was going to save the rest of us. But I could never shake the feeling that these were movies about someone else’s heroism, not mine, not my neighbour’s, and not of the other bystanders to American bravura. What they impressed with spectacle they denied to spectators who didn’t have this flag as theirs.
Wandering Earth, partly because it’s a bit childlike, brought back childhood memories. Only this time the flag was a different colour. In fact, the politics of flags in this film was far from discreet. They were all over the place; every uniform sported one and since everyone was uniformed the banners were hard to miss. I’d be hard-pressed to recall a recent movie that displayed them so ostentatiously – which had the effect of noting to the rest of us bystanders that, especially for those who don’t have flags at all, that they don’t belong in this super-power epic even if they are huddled underground waiting to be saved. So, while I marveled at giant Tonkas smashing their way across the blackened landscape, admired the heavy-metal infrastructure that would make Joseph Stalin fume, and laughed at the cheesy teenage speech about hope (wondering if I was supposed to get weepy instead), in the end this reminded me of what’s unsatisfying about epics about the showcased saviours and the hidden saved.
Bastiaan Bouwman | 4.16.20
In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells remarks on the challenges in producing fiction about the climate crisis. We have plenty of disaster movies and series about the world after an apocalyptic event nearly wipes humanity off the face of the earth, but climate change is a problem that eludes effective dramatization. One might read The Wandering Earth – beyond its intention to entertain a global mass audience, rake in a good profit, and bolster a sense of China’s technological and cultural ascendancy, as Sophia notes – as an effort at remedying this problem, using a single key sleight of hand. Instead of climate change as it presently confronts us, the existential threat is the expansion of the sun (a phenomenon that in reality is set to occur on a timescale of billions of years) in a matter of one or two centuries, prompting the earth’s forced migration to another solar system. As a planetary ‘climate refugee’ it is blissfully unhampered by border controls, but nevertheless engaged in a perilous journey, and without a recipient ‘host society’ to look forward to, merely the space to fashion a new world.
Does this sleight of hand invalidate the comparison with contemporary climate change? On the one hand, the scientific predictions at the more extreme end of the spectrum, which Wallace-Wells cautions us are more likely to become reality than we often assume, especially if the world is insufficiently decisive in its response, are not that far from a wipe-out scenario. If a variety of outcomes like increases in temperature, ocean acidification, and mass extinction could reinforce each other and change our environment too rapidly for the vast majority of the Earth’s population to adjust, the imperative to take swift action would seem as urgent as in the film. Fortunately, climate change – unlike the sun’s expansion – is man-made, so we could presumably manage it without resorting to the draconian utilitarian measures deployed in the film. On the other hand, the reality may be that climate change is different in that it affects the world’s population in highly uneven ways. The incentives to take action are thus not existentially urgent on the part of those best positioned to do so. If our takeaway from this film, then, is that only an all-encompassing threat will generate a sufficiently robust response, this draws our attention to the importance of highlighting the cross-cutting significance of the threats posed by climate change.
Claire Vergerio | 4.17.20
As Sophia notes, it’s easy to read a lot into the film The Wandering Earth. While it has all the hallmarks of a cookie-cutter Hollywood blockbuster, everyone—including, as Bastiaan found out, whoever reviewed it for the Chinese People’s Daily—seems to think there’s something quintessentially Chinese about it. Perhaps The Wandering Earth reveals something about China’s changing self-awareness as a rising superpower. Perhaps it gives us an unprecedented lens into its vision for a future world order (one in which the US is conspicuously absent). Perhaps the bits of the plot that seem most at odds with Hollywood blockbusters are windows into China’s cultural essence. Or perhaps not. As the old Latin saying goes: Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli—literally, according to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny. So much of what we read into this film is first and foremost about ourselves. It reveals our expectations of what “Chineseness” entails and our desperate search for clues into how China might decide to project its newfound power. This film was a huge box office hit in China, becoming its third highest grossing film of all time. Perhaps the one thing we can safely intuit, then, in light of Sophia’s comparison of the film with the novella, is that these days, epic narratives that steer away from asking any difficult questions are just as popular in Beijing as they are in Hollywood.
Ayça Çubukçu | 4.18.20
Given its sponsorship by the People’s Republic of China, the temptation is there, as Claire notes, to see the Wandering Earth as an essentially Chinese story about humanity’s fate. The Chinese state would welcome such a temptation, I imagine, as if it were the representative not only of generations of Chinese people in the past and present, but also in the future, as long as the world lasts. But that, I am afraid, is the sovereign dream world over, not one particular to the Chinese state. In this sovereign dreamworld, I would like to note the unimaginative fate of “humanity” under a world (or rather, inter-national)government. As Jeremy notes, “the politics of flags” in the Wandering Earth is telling, every uniform has one—a national one that we-of-this-world-of nation-states can readily recognize. In fact, thousands of years, hundreds of generations from now, humanity is “still” understood in national ways: one-nation and one-flag at a time. Humanity is “still” governed through a global Security Council, where China, of course, is “still” a permanent member—only this time, in the position of humanity’s saviour. Not that one should expect “progress.” Unless what is meant by progress turns out to be, as Walter Benjamin once said, one single catastrophe.
Pascale Siegrist | 4.18.20
What can be said of a – let’s face it: not exactly great – movie if a review is not what we have in mind? Previous commentators have speculated on what a Chinese take on the tropes of the sci-fi-apocalypse genre might tell us about climate change and the geopolitical visions espoused by the PRC (represented here in the film’s complex funding architecture rather than its so far unnamed director, Frant Gwo). Claire and Ayça, on the other hand, alert us to the politics of watching ‘foreign’ films as a supposedly unmediated path of access to a ‘foreign’ worldview. It is certainly tempting to draw comparisons to The Wandering Earth’s Western cousins, most obviously to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar: Why does is this father not get to keep his promise of return? Why didn’t Gwo consult with astrophysicists for a plausible storyline and imagery if the PRC is so eager to showcase its scientific prowess? Do the Confucian aphorisms serve the same mantra-like function as Dylan Thomas’s poem? Why are there no human defenders of ‘Plan B’ in this version? Why don’t we get rewarded with the cathartic view of an earth replenished after escaping the catastrophe? Why is the past of Gwo’s Earth entirely fictional, where Nolan so elegantly embeds his story in the Dustbowl? But such questions quickly bring us into the territory of the movie review, and a condescending one for that, not unlike the fascination with which one might watch the cultish ‘Turkish Star Wars’.
So the real question that I want to raise here is how the issue of the movie’s ‘Chineseness’ – and our own ideas of ‘Chineseness’! – relate to a second point Sophia, Jeremy, Bastiaan and Claire have all stressed: that the Wandering Earth is a relatively conflict-free, or perhaps, a post-conflict planet. If there was controversy about decision to sacrifice half the earth’s population, this seems to have largely abated. The United Earth Government is quickly swayed by a single devoted captain. As if to calm the fears of the critics of China’s potent surveillance state, even the acronym-bearing AI-system, that apparently essential feature of any space station (MOSS in this case), can be outwitted with no more than bottle of vodka, conveniently left in place by the Russian colleague. As Gwo turns the world-saviour movie into a truly universal genre, the answer appears to lie in the magnitude of the threat, which left no other choice but to bundle all resources. But in our current crisis on The Staying (at home) Earth, where an American each-to-themselves, a WHO internationalist and a Chinese damage-control-through-health-diplomacy vision compete, it is becoming apparent that opposing universalisms themselves can be a source of conflict.
Onur Ulas Ince | 4.19.20
As have already been noted, a number of framing choices distinguish the “Chinese” way of saving the world from its more familiar American predecessors: the dynastic temporal scale that does not promise redemption even as it counsels patient faith in its possibility (vs. the immediate viewer gratification offered by a redemptive finale); the sequential, unceremonious acts of self-sacrifice for collective survival (vs. dramatised acts of heroism that individuate the performer of the act); and the dogged insistence on the inter-national coordination of the response to save the species (vs. the fundamental reorganisation of planetary politics under a unitary system of authority and substantive principles). Whether avowed or attributed, these choices align with a geopolitical stance suspicious of the discourses of individualism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism serving as vectors and veils of imperial or hegemonic intent.
Beneath the divergent geopolitical and temporal imaginaries of collective mobilisation, however, lies a prominent common fidelity to technological solutions to the biggest problems confronting humanity. Building 11,000 fusion propulsion engines to pop the plant off its orbit makes the current proposals to dim the sun by stratospheric aerosol injection look like frying eggs on a Tuesday. A rather convenient plot strategy that liberates this technological fix from the ethical burden of its gargantuan sacrifices is to pose the catastrophe as entirely exogenous (the sun flips the bird at us), enlisting it more easily to the deep modernist trope of humanity facing down an alien nature with resolve and ingenuity. Giant trucks, excavators, exoskeletal thermal suits (strangely, with robotic chain guns attached to them), and above all fusion reactors are all monuments to the power that human beings conjure up in carving up a space for themselves (literally) in an uninhabitable earth and (metaphorically) in an unwelcoming solar system.
The trope is of course not unique to Wandering Earth and dates back to earliest disaster blockbusters like Michael Bay’s Armageddon (though one ought to admit that blowing up an asteroid appears marginally more glorious than a B- science project next to igniting Jupiter’s atmosphere). The broader point is, with a nod to Bastiaan, the solution would look a lot more ambiguous if technology and alienation from nature were presented as part of the problem — which is precisely the starting point of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, where the ice age that entraps the remnants of humanity in a train is caused by the very effort to combat climate change by geo-engineering the atmosphere. And whereas in Wandering Earth everybody flies coach to the new solar system (at least in underground Beijing), and the only lines of distinction are the horizontal ones of flags and languages, Snowpiercer focalises the unrelenting class hierarchies that mediate “humanity’s” exposure to anthropogenic climate destruction.
Perhaps to force a connection, both Demain and Wandering Earth hypostatise what they present as the principal threat, in which the audiences interpellated to align with the narrators or protagonists are not implicated. Evoking a nefarious, if nebulous, process of corporate globalisation transpiring “out there” is no doubt helpful for casting into relief the local practices of resilience and sustainability, as casting the extinction of humanity as imminent and non-negotiable conduces to imagining the scale of collective mobilisation and sacrifices likely necessary to counter it. But playing down, if not obfuscating, the social-relational aspect of anthropogenic climate change is the price paid for getting the message across.
A less forced connection presents itself to the pervasive reaction to the SARS Cov-2 pandemic, which paints the pathogen as a force of nature that has arrived from the wild “out there,” deflecting attention from the social-relational conditions of its zoonotic transfer, spread, and differential toll across countries. To echo Pascale here, spotlighting the sheer magnitude and scale of the pandemic, epitomised in the mantra “we’re all in this together,” is instrumental to bundling resources at one level. But what that mantra hides from sight — put bluntly, a system of privatised gains and socialised losses — is also arguably the reason why the political and economic elites so readily turn to that mantra in times of crisis, whether they speak French, Chinese, or English.