Clocking in at nearly three hours, this prequel/alt-story to the 2019 blockbuster Chinese sci-fi actioner from the same director delivers similar ambition in terms of ideas and screen spectacle yet feels a little more restrained and emotional. Here, Planet Earth is under threat from an expanding Sun, the film following the plan to move the planet to break away from the Moon and travel far out of danger's reach and also exploring opposition faction Digital Life (preserving human consciousness in digital form) from the early spectacular hijacked drones attack on a military base and the Space Elevator to the final desperate attempts to survive. It is again visually mind-boggling, with its enormous-scale megastructures, devastated cities and disaster scenarios, but the mid-section is notably more restrained, contained and talky, as the AI/consciousness sub-plot is brought to the fore and a new planetary threat emerges, but once the action mayhem returns it is frenetic and spectacular. Although slightly less frantic overall and certainly more sombre than the original, the film is packed with characters and plot strands that miraculously are brought together for the ending's crisis to be averted. Like most big-spectacle blockbusters, the plot and central concepts do not bear any scrutiny, and Hollywood would never commit to something as colossally insane as The Wandering Earth movies, but the sheer ambition and scale of these films, with an attempt to balance with some emotional beats, make them hugely entertaining, if exhausting.
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