The Wandering Earth II

It' too long and too complicated, but The Wandering Earth II has an interesting concept: The Earth must be towed away from the solar system in order to prevent the sun from crashing into it. Unfortunately, that kernel is lost in the morass of clunky storytelling, cliched action hero characters, and so much bombastic everything that it makes the work of Michael Bay seem subtle and nuanced by comparison. No real character development begins until well past the one-hour mark, and so much of that first hour is spent repeating the backstory that it's difficult to care what happens one way or the other.

The movie comes off as China's answer to the blockbuster sci-fi epic, and, just like many of these types of movies made in the United States, there's a heavy-handed jingoistic nationalism at work here that gets tiresome. There's simply too much of everything. First the sun is going to engulf the Earth, and then there's something about a project that promises eternal life (why you would want that if the Sun is going to swallow the Earth is a mystery), and the last third or so of the movie concerns blowing up the moon. For some viewers, that may bring to mind the classic Mr. Show with Bob and David sketch about blowing up the moon, but this isn't that funny -- at least, not deliberately so.