The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019)

[wattsup32]

The Wandering Earth (Frant Gwo, 2019)

This film is making tons of money in China and I saw it to a packed house at 1030am today.

There are one and a half good acting performances and not a single redeeming aspect otherwise. The writing is paper-thin and missing all of its connecting pieces. The camera work lacks any sense of an aesthetic or unifying principal. The editing is an unfocused mess. Tonally, it never understands what it is going for or how to go for it. And the CGI is not as good as most any Nickelodeon show aimed at the 2-4 year old set (maybe that's an exaggeration, but not by much).

I do not like not being able to find some good in things, but I will be surprised if I see a worse movie in 2019.

[J Wilson]

Saw The Wandering Earth last night. It's pretty terrible, as mentioned above. About as cliche as it gets from beginning to end.

[Lost Highway]

The Wandering Earth got dumped on Netflix here and I managed 20 minutes till I gave up. The premise is appealingly outlandish and I could see it handled in an eccentric or poetic manner, but this is the usual result when non-English speaking countries attempt a Hollywood style blockbuster. Hideous characterisation, sub-par CGI and the assumption that a film like this needs constant action to appeal to its audience.

It reminded me of the commercial big budget films which get made here in Germany. Jim Button and Lucas the Engine Driver, the latest German blockbuster of this type and the most expensive German language film ever made, managed to rope in Shirley MacLaine in a voice role to appeal to English speaking territories, but never made it to the UK or the US. 25 million is a huge budget for Germany but still too low to really pull off a major fantasy, effects driven movie. Unlike The Wandering Earth it flopped, because Germany is a small country compared to China and yet they are currently shooting a sequel.

[colinr0380]

How do the big budget films made in Germany compare to something like Luc Besson's recent work Lost Highway? That's mostly what comes to my mind when I think of (relatively) big budget effects driven spectacles made outside of Hollywood. Though Terra Formars was a good recent example too I guess (though according to the extra features on the disc for that film, the production got some assistance from Christopher Nolan's Interstellar crew to enable filming in Iceland. It was also quite novel to see a Takashi Miike film opening with a Warner Bros logo!)

[Lost Highway]

How do the big budget films made in Germany compare to something like Luc Besson's recent work Lost Highway? That's mostly what comes to my mind when I think of (relatively) big budget effects driven spectacles made outside of Hollywood. Though Terra Formars was a good recent example too I guess (though according to the extra features on the disc for that film, the production got some assistance from Christopher Nolan's Interstellar crew to enable filming in Iceland. It was also quite novel to see a Takashi Miike film opening with a Warner Bros logo!)

I’m no fan of Besson, but at least his films bear the vision and eccentricities of an auteur and the same goes for the more commercial films by Takashi Miike.

When Germany attempts a Hollywood style blockbuster it’s like the filmmakers don’t know how the formula works and they try to emulate the most bland cliches of a Hollywood blockbuster. They neglect any attempt at characterisation for caricature, they think these films need to have constant action, which makes them exhausting and noisy rather than fun and what is a sizeable budget in Europe is still not enough for these films look expensive. They just look chintzy and cheap. The talent isn’t here, anybody with genuine talent heads straight to Hollywood. The non-art house directors here are hacks and film funding in Germany is a joke. Every year there is at least one if these mock-Hollywood movies coming out in Germany and they never make it abroad. They still try hard for their own Harry Potter type of film or franchise.

One odd thing is that horror films would have a huge audience here. You’ll find horror titles on blu-ray in Germany which come out nowhere else and there is a hugely popular horror film festival here. But German film funding is too myopic, conservative and old fashioned to support horror films. Horror films would be cheap to produce and they tend to turn a healthy profit, while these pseudo-blockbusters crash and burn.

They are currently shooting a sequel to Jim Button and Lucas the Engine Driver in Babelsberg, even though that film cost € 25 million (a huge budget for Germany) and only made back around €11 million. They clearly had hopes for breaking into the English speaking market by drafting in Shirley MacLaine but that didn’t happen. The Michael Ende kids books the Jim Button films are based on were full of clever ideas and concepts, but just like with the adaptation of his The Neverending Story the film manages to drain every ounce of intelligence from its source.

Roland Emmerich always struck me as a typically crass German director who makes terrible films but for some reason he’s made it in Hollywood (I will admit to a guilty love for his 2012, where he went so far into excess, it flipped over into deranged brilliance)

Asian and French cinema has long been far more adept at commercial movies than Germany has been. While The Wandering Earth reminded my of the bland, crass movies produced here, they clearly got something right, because unlike the German blockbusters, this thing was huge.

[colinr0380]

I'm just imagining a parallel universe were have a big blockbuster Jörg Buttgereit film! Would any Buttgereit film still be depressing, grungy and death obsessed even on a huge budget? And what if he did the Luc Besson/Robert Rodriguez thing of making CGI animated children's films? It could potentially end up as mentally scarring as the Happy Tree Friends!

Tom Tykwer is really the only major German director that comes immediately to my mind at the moment, with Run Lola Run being a huge breakthrough beyond arthouse and into the mainstream in some ways, though as you say his latest films have been Hollywood ones.

And it is interesting to bring up Roland Emmerich, as I quite like (the immediately rather charmingly dated) 2012 as well, as the closest to When Worlds Collide that modern disaster movies have yet come! Even in the worst films (Independence Day), there is at least attention paid in his films to characters having little arcs rather than an assumption that that the spectacle can carry the entire production on its own. Plus in 2012 there is the brilliantly awful and embarassing metaphorical journey that the poor girl playing John Cusack's daughter has to have about constantly wetting herself and then proudly saying that she has learnt not to in the incredibly awkward final line of the film (which I guess is supposed to be an allegorical parallel to the planet 'wetting itself' on a grand scale?). Its almost as gobsmackingly bad/fantastically funny as the final moment of brief manufactured racial harmony at the end of Volcano in which another young child says with wide eyes that they are surprised to see that all of the people turned grey by falling ash now all look the same colour!