Movie · 2023 · Science Fiction, Action, Adventure · 2h 54m · NR · Chinese
Curator score: 3.2/10 (24.8K ratings)
Overview
Humans built huge engines on the surface of the earth to find a new home. But the road to the universe is perilous. In order to save earth, young people once again have to step forward to start a race against time for life and death.
Ratings
Curator score: 3.2/10
IMDb: 6.7/10
Letterboxd: 3.21/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 83%
Metacritic: 56
TMDB: 7.3/10
Director
Frant Gwo
Production
Guo Fan Culture and Media, G!Film Studio, DF Pictures, China Film Group Corporation
Cast
Wu Jing, Andy Lau, Li Xuejian, Sha Yi, Ning Li, Wang Zhi, Zhu Yanmanzi, Andy Friend, Wang Ruoxi, Tong Liya, Vatilli Makarychev, Zhang Yi, Kawawa Kadichi, Clara Lee, Vladimir Ershov, Tony Nicholson, Hu Xianxu, Huo Qing, Liu Yin, Guo Yiqian
Curator Review
Verdict
A huge, effects-driven sci-fi spectacle with genuine scale and a strong sense of planetary stakes, but it is also overstuffed, expository, and emotionally blunt. If you want maximalist disaster SF and don’t mind dense plotting, it can be thrilling; if you need clean storytelling or lighter pacing, it may feel exhausting.
Best for
viewers who love big-budget disaster sci-fi
fans of hard-sell spectacle and worldbuilding
audiences comfortable with heavy exposition
people who enjoyed the first film’s scale but wanted more polish
Skip if
you dislike long, information-dense blockbusters
you want character-first science fiction
you’re sensitive to jingoistic or overtly earnest nationalistic framing
you prefer concise, elegant plotting over constant escalation
Overview
The Wandering Earth II is a rare thing: a blockbuster that treats planetary engineering like an act of mythic labor. Its best qualities are scale, conviction, and the sheer audacity of its images, which make the movie feel larger than most studio sci-fi in both ambition and physical design. When it leans into catastrophe and infrastructure, it can be exhilarating.
Worth noting
At the same time, the film is overloaded with explanation, countdowns, and procedural detail. That density gives it texture, but it also slows the momentum and can make the drama feel schematic. The emotional beats land more through volume than subtlety, and the film’s seriousness sometimes hardens into stiffness.
Bottom line
For viewers who want a maximalist, high-stakes science-fiction epic, this is worth a look. For everyone else, it’s an impressive but uneven spectacle: often astonishing, occasionally tedious, and never shy about its own importance.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Mia (5★) · 193 likes
Losing my mind. Cannot believe how good this is. The first movie is solid and cute and you watch it with the attitude of, "Nice job team. You successfully managed these absurd amounts of money into something big and interestingly expensive that goes through the simple motions." A pretty classic piece of unwieldy emotional tedium made impressive by the fact that money makes the world go round, and doing visuals no one's done before stays arresting (even when it's not… more Losing my mind. Cannot believe how good this is. The first movie is solid and cute and you watch it with the attitude of, "Nice job team. You successfully managed these absurd amounts of money into something big and interestingly expensive that goes through the simple motions." A pretty classic piece of unwieldy emotional tedium made impressive by the fact that money makes the world go round, and doing visuals no one's done before stays arresting (even when it's not… more
George Carmi (4★) · 138 likes
Moving this to the top of my list of films I wish I had seen on the biggest screen possible. "Grand" truly feels like the only word to describe this project, yet I still feel like I am underselling just how tremendous this effort is. A film, so monumental in scope, I am genuinely blown away by its ambition and commitment to its narrative.
comrade_yui (5★) · 131 likes
the sci-fi epic of my childhood dreams -- an internationalist future spearheaded by an attitude of dogged humanist determinism, a truly titanic and detailed depiction of the efforts that would actually go into such an insane premise, operatic valor and courage expanding across the entire solar system, emotion conveyed through the medium of technology, the definition of cinema itself.
i think this works so much better than the first because it starts closer to our current period and then quickly… more
Egy_ (1★) · 114 likes
Hear me out. The only relevant problem with this "thing" is not sentimentality, or propaganda, or any of your generic artlessness. This "movie" is nothing but three hours of expositions crammed together—with tear-teasers as exceptions—conveyed entirely through news flashes, astronauts yelling, and inane close-ups, however big the close-up-ed thing is. It cannot be divided into scenes—it is not to be considered to be anything but a montage-style, educational video of its entire runtime, for that matter—having been stripped down to bare information flashing by. I hope you like tiktoks.
I H 🪬 (5★) · 89 likes
in 2003 john woo was set to produce a live action Evangelion film which was also pitched to Jerry Bruckheimer and Steven Spielberg and if they had made that film and also got a director who adores James Cameron, and believes in the capacity of humanity to complete the project somewhat put forth by the space age but never put to global unity because of the space race, and the nostalgia for the aesthetics of that era with the modernist tint of the present, that film would look like this