[Review] The Wandering Earth (3.5/10) [Liu Lang Di Qiu]

Title - The Wandering Earth [Liu Lang Di Qiu]
Production - Beijing Dengfeng International Culture Communications Company, Alibaba Pictures Group
Starring - Qu Chu Xiao, Wu Jing, Zhao Jin Mai, Li Guang Jie,  Lei Jia Yin, Yang Hao Yu, Guo Jing Fei, Mike Kai Sui, Yang Yi, Qu Jing Jing, Jason Zhang, Ng Man Tat, Zhang Yi Chi, Zhang Zi XIan, Li Hong Chen, Liu Zi, 
Writer - Ye Ru Chang, Guo Fan
Director - Guo Fan
Release - 5 February 2019

There was a good story in here but the execution was really bad. Here's what I think happened.

If I'm not mistaken, this was the biggest budgeted blockbuster from China at the time of release. And it's easy to see where / how / what that budget was used for. Every element in the movie was more or less CGI. And perhaps, even then, there was still not enough budget so something had to be sacrificed.

To take the hit, it was the voice recording. It's as if no sound recording was done while the actors were acting. The script even went so far as not to give any dialogue sometimes, even when it was the movie's lead or main characters.

So everyone was dubbed. And Chinese movies love their dubbing because they are able to hire actors who don't primarily speak Mandarin to work in the movie. I detest this. Here's why.

Dubbing are not the most accurate when seeing how the mouth moves while we hear their voices and their words. So what happened here was the editing used a lot of quick cut-aways so the audience would not be able to focus on the characters while they delivered lines. It happened a lot that we see one character started talking and the scene shifted to another angle or another scene altogether. Hence, the audience were never really able to live in the moment with the characters.

Even on important monologues, shaky camera effects were used. The whole thing just felt fake.

And many a time when some kind of destruction happened to the characters, the camera did not stay with the situation. We only got to see the effect after the fact and had to put two and two together to imagine what happened. Again, lack of budget to CGI destruction that effected characters.

It's very disappointing and also disappointed at how well the movie did, even spawning a sequel soon after; which I will not bother with.