One of the hottest topics over Chinese New Year was the release of the science fiction film, The Wandering Earth, adapted from the novella of the same name written by celebrated mainland sci-fi author Cixin Liu. Since its release, the film has received great critical acclaim and commercial success. As of the beginning of March, the box office takings had exceeded RMB4.5 billion, making it China’s second highest grossing film of all time.
Readers fond of sci-fi works are probably familiar with the name “Cixin Liu”. In 2015, Liu won the Hugo Award for Best Novel with The Three-Body Problem, which is the first novel of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy; the second and third novels are entitled The Dark Forest and Death’s End.
Since then, he has become the “standard bearer” for Chinese sci-fi literature in the world, and is praised for “single-handedly elevating Chinese sci-fi works to a world-class level”. Therefore, it is no surprise that a film adapted from his works would set box office records and become a heated topic of dicussion across the country.
Cixin Liu’s novella collection The Wandering Earth has eight stories. Short in length and simple in structure, they leave a wide space for the imagination. It is worth pointing out that many may think that there is no need to read the book since they’ve watched the film, but that is not true – in fact, the film just adopts the setting of the original story: the Sun has aged and is about to turn into a red giant, so the United Earth Government plans to initiate a project to move the Earth out of the Solar System in order to preserve human civilization. But the plots of the novella and movie are completely different.
The main plot of the film is about how humans attempt to escape the great gravitational pull from Jupiter, a fatal situation caused by “Roche limit”. But that does not happen in Cixin Liu’s original story; instead it explores another layer of entanglement about human nature: in the face of the dying Sun, humans convert the Earth into a spaceship and then hide in underground cities. Slowly they split into two rival factions: the “Earth Faction” and “Spaceship Faction”, who are constantly arguing with each other. The antagonism and hatred continue for generations, and ultimately, as doubts and dissatisfaction with the United Earth Government escalate, a slaughter in the name of “uprising” breaks out…
Without doubt, the grand and futuristic scenes in the film are not the “main course” of Liu’s story. Behind the fantasy idea of “converting the earth into a spaceship” lies a penetrating critique of social structures and the darkness of human nature. The story takes place in the future, but the issues discussed are very much relevant to the present: in times of serious social crisis, fatuous humans still turn a blind eye to reality. They have ferocious arguments and try to kill people with different opinions.
Is it really like milking the bull to ask people to change the future, reverse their destiny, and create a truly global “community of shared interests”? If people really want to break away from this dreadful fate, what should they do? This thought-provoking question, even in an age when the Sun is still going strong and the Earth needs no enormous thrusters installed, is still worth pondering by all human beings on this globe.
