Very high budget blockbuster. It covers a long period with 3 completely separate parts (or 4 as the third part of the movie has 2 parallel stories). Each deals with a different crisis in the project. Not a fan of the constant "X days/hours till (the next incident)". They also seem very _inspired_ by other movies.

It's mostly character driven, we follow a few characters, even when their part is not that interesting, only chinese one. It's funny because it tries to pretend the project is international (as it should as it involves the whole planet) and there are a few non chinese characters, but only the chinese ones get a huge screen announcing their name.

Of course, the whole thing is scientifically totally absurd, at every single level, so no point spending time on that (well, maybe a bit for fun). But let's just assume it's possible to install engine to propulse a planet, that there is enough energy source to make them run for centuries, that they use a technology that does not just burn the atmosphere, etc.

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First part is a terrorist attack on the space elevator. It's a complete debauchery of effects, fights, explosions, jet fighters fighting drones. There's actually too much action to follow. It looks a lot like the **Independance day** attack scene.

One things that makes little sense. There were several solutions proposed to save mankind, and what we're seeing is the project that won, trying to move the Earth outside of the solar system. Terrorists seem to be promoters of one of the dropped solutions, where people would digitize their brain and mankind would survive as digital copies. However, where would they run ? If the Earth is destroyed, there would be no computer left running for it.
Also as we see later with Yaya, the most advanced quantum computer at the time of the beginning of the movie can only run one person for two minutes. There are better computers later, and maybe if all the focus of the project was put on creating more servers to host mankind it would have improved even more, but enough to run billions of people forever ?
And whatever their promoters think, the end result is not you, it's a copy. You would still die.

____

Second part is lunar engine crisis, where the engine used to move the moon away shut down.There's not much of the incident itself except it just happens. On the side we follow Tu Hengyu, obsessed with the digital copy of his dead daughter. It's unclear whether [spoiler]him uploading his daughter to the 550W computer[/spoiler] is linked with the moon incident. Though they are simultaneous, the mid credits scene implies [spoiler]it was done by the computer anyway.[/spoiler]. Also this computer seems to be offline.

This is the low part of the movie. After the _in your face_ first part, it is really calm and less stressful. It is also very ambiguous morally. It's presented like he is a brave guy, who's missing his dead daughter ([spoiler]dead by his own inattention on the road by the way[/spoiler]). It's sad and emotional, blabla. And the third part makes him a hero.

However, what what he's doing is [spoiler]corrupting what seems to be the most powerful computer on Earth, heavily involved in the project to save the Earth[/spoiler]. The consequences are / could be (it's not clear what actually happens) beyond measure, possibly destroying the whole plan to ensure the survival of mankind. All for a selfish and petty (in these times, a LOOOOT of people are losing family members, and they just deal with it) reason. He literally is the worst selfish piece of shit criminal asshole to ever exist in the history of mankind.

____

Third part is basically **Armageddon** but super sized as we're dealing with:
- the moon instead of an asteroid
- every single nuclear warhead instead of one
- some hundreds astronauts instead of just one Bruce Willis.

Back to more high budget stuff. Not at the level of the first part, but a lot happens on the moon. However the whole plot is even more unsustainable than the rest. The main focus here is how stupid every thing is.

They send nuclear heads to the moon, but they have a hard time deciphering the keys.
=> It's not like they stole them and have to bruteforce hack them. They have the keys, what would take 1000 hours, specially given the computers they have.

Some of the nuclear heads can't be automatically activated in time and they need to synchronize all the explosions. So they will do it manually on hundreds of them.
=> How could you synchronize hundreds of people manually pushing a button ? If you're 2 milliseconds late, you'll be vaporized by the nearby bomb before you can push the button. So when we see [spoiler]the astronauts pushing their trigger one after the other, with the bombs starting to explode in the background[/spoiler]...

Also, they realize they need that 2h before the limit.
=> Looks like they manage to mount a mission, pick the people, train and prepare them, and send hundreds of shuttles to the moon in under an hour (even if the moon is getting closer, that's quite fast).

The deadline is when the Moon reaches the Roche limit. The Roche limit of the Earth-Moon system is 9500km from the center of Earth, which is 3100 km outside Earth or less than twice the Moon radius.
=> The Moon should have looked so much closer when nearing the limit.

Funny (kinda) part when China is announcing that despite what is planned, they will allow all of their population (instead of half) to join underground cities. This is definitely China's style :)

In parallel they are trying to reboot the internet to handle simultaneous control of Earth engine.
=> So apparently manually starting was synchronous enough for atomic bombs , but not for starting engines.
=> Like if rebooting 3 data centers would make the whole internet work... Aren't there destroyed cables and relays all over the world that would need electricity ?
=> The launch still needs to be done at a push of a button
=> It definitely happens [spoiler]after the given deadline[/spoiler]

In this part we are shown how [spoiler]Tu Hengyu uploading his daughter[/spoiler] was actually a good thing. Meh.

Now about the engines, seeing how they're situated, aren't a lot of them on the oceans ? Not sure how it would work.
Also they cover about half of the Earth, are there any living space left on the side they're one ?
Aren't they quite lucky that they're facing the right way at the moment they need to start them ?
If Earth needs several thousands engines, 3 would be useless for the Moon (only 100x lighter).
Not clear either how these instantly stop the Earth (or Moon) rotation. Because propulsion would be useless otherwise.

____

The mid credits scene indicates that [spoiler]the 550W computer, renaming itself MOSS, is actually the source of all incidents[/spoiler]. It does not seem consistent since:
1) [spoiler]550W didn't exist yet at the time of the first incident. And even if it did, it would definitely not be the latest version at the time of the following ones.[/spoiler].

2) [spoiler]The 550W in the interview room seems to be offline. So would MOSS be another 550W ? And how would it have synchronized the upload of Yaya with the engine failure ? It could be that MOSS predicted EVERYTHING and seems it was part of its plan to have Tu Hengyu digital copy, and it needed Yaya's copy for that. But that is several magnitude orders more powerful than what it's supposed to be able to do.[/spoiler] However it also [spoiler]says it will be responsible for a crisis years later, so yeah, maybe it's able to entirely predict the future[/spoiler].

There's a fastly passed over sequence indicating that there are previsions of the incident dates (but I didn't get where they came from). Probably from the instigator, which also seems weird.

While sure, there is propaganda here, but let's be honest, which country did not use movies/films to push their own propaganda? Which country did not make themselves as the “heroes” or “better race”? Can you truly say that your local movie or film production companies are not guilty of it?

In other words, let's put that aside and address the underlying “lessons”, if you will, of this story, and that is: humanity.

Have we truly reached the point wherein we are capable of working together to save the only planet we have today? Or are we still the same humanity for the past centuries, and millennia, bent on conquering and destroying everyone else who doesn't subscribe to our own beliefs and political aspirations? It doesn't matter if you're American, Chinese, Japanese, British, Spaniard, French, German, Russian, it all applies to us, most especially the so-called “colonials” and “supreme race”.

Where are we today?

Do we really need to have these disasters to make us realise we need to work together as one humanity? We may not need to build 10,000 super engines today, but we do have global crises coming and trying to survive from. Yet, at the end of the day, if we are going to be honest with ourselves, it still boils down to “my country”, “my politics”, and “my money”, the rest can die in oblivion.

The real deal here is that, no matter what our country is, no matter which nation we call home, no matter what our political stance is, we all want the same thing: to be with our families, survive, and give our children and children's children, a better life than what we've gone through. It's all about you and me, our life as human beings. Intelligent human beings.

If we cannot re-learn this basic and fundamental lesson, then the human race here on Earth is doomed to fail, or to put another way, we are just delaying the inevitable.

I'm not talking about globalisation or establishing a United Earth or Earth Union or whatever you want to call the one world government. Personally, I think we can keep our national identities without devolving into savage beasts thinking we're better than the other nations. We just need to realise that we all want the same thing, protection, and continuation of our own respective families. If we recognise this fundamental fact, I do believe we can live in peace with our neighbours.

And this is what I think this movie wants to convey.

The Wandering Earth II or the "wandering script", as I call it, does nothing to improve upon a proposition that failed to work, the first time around.

Its alright to create a space saga but trying to cram the whole thing down the audiences throat in two sittings, is simply too much to ask. My wife, who is Chinese, became exasperated about half an hour in and I don't blame her.

There are simply too many disparate things going on at once, for this film to present anything, even a highly switched on viewer, like my economist other half, can reasonably follow.

What you are left with, is what amounts to mini films, that feel like little like extended trailers, cobbled together over an lengthy time line, that become so diffuse, as to loose the potential to represent any semblance of a comprehensible "whole".

Graphics are admittedly amazing, as are some of the sci fi conceptualisations. Acting's mostly pretty decent, too. That said, what are these elements without clarity of storytelling?

In summary, best described as an overly ambitious, ill considered "sci fi, hot mess" that's clearly had a lot of time and money invested in it. If this had been broken down into smaller, bite sized films with less crammed in, I think it could have worked, a lot better.

Now then, it's best - I think - to just accept that there is very, very, little plausible science to this save-the-planet movie. The format, and the story, have oft been done by Hollywood before so it's not top of the originality tree either - but it's still quite a watchable and well produced story of a group of Chinese trainees who must raise their game when they find themselves trying to save the infrastructure being built to help save the planet from terrorists. It's extremely perilous for them, their enemy is sophisticated and well entrenched. When the moon becomes unstable, it again falls to them to stop it crashing into the Earth before a carefully placed series of thousands of engines around the globe can be activated to propel us all out of danger and off to a new orbit around Alpha Centauri. The acting talents and the dialogue are really neither here nor there, but the visual effects - especially at the start - are effective and the pace of the film is as times entertaining as this dedicated team - and others from around the world - must unite to thwart the unseen enemy and rescue mankind before it's all too late. It really does need shortening though. It could lose an hour and - tightened up - have a much more focussed and impactful storyline that would hold the attention just as well as any Western equivalents. It does need a big screen to get the best from the creativity of the visuals but students of physics (astro or otherwise) may blush at some of it!