Will 2019 will be the year that climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, enters the global movie mainstream?

 

"Perhaps 2019 will be the year that climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, enters the global mainstream."
-- from MIT film critic Gary Zhexi Zhang



by staff writer with agencies


A CULTURAL BLOG WEBPOSTED IN DEMOCRATIC AND INDEPENDENT TAIWAN -- Gary Zhexi Zhang  was born in Communist China in 1993 but left the country as a child and was raised and eductated in Britain, where he went to school and became fluent as a matter of course in reading, writing and speaking English. Today he is a SMACT graduate student in the Class of 2019 at MIT in Boston where in his spare time he works as both a film critic and a video artist. (He no longer carries a PRC passport, perhaps a British one.)

So from being born in Communist China (and with relatives who still live there and who he occasionally jets over to visit) to being raised and educated as on overseas Chinese in the West (Britain and America), he knows better than the rest of us just how the Chinese Communist Party operates and controls the mass media and such ''Orwellian nonsense'' as "patriotism" and "nationalism."

So when Zhang recently sat down in Boston to write a film review of a popular cli-fi blockbuster from China titled '‘The Wandering Earth,’' he knew what he was talking about and didn't mince words.

His article was headlined  ''Can Chinese Blockbuster ‘The Wandering Earth’ Take 'Climate Fiction' Mainstream?' and in it he made a startling prediction ......that took this blogger by surprise .....while at the same time I applaud his vision.

The Chinese movie is the highest-grossing film of 2019 inside the Communist behomoth and its storyline pits a Chinese-led international coalition against the forces of cosmic destruction. Is the movie propaganda for the dictatorship or is a new development in the Chinese movie world which sometimes copies Hollywood forumlas and sometimes goes its own way.

Here's Zhang: '''The Wandering Earth' is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi epic based on a Chinese novella published in 2000 by the celebrated sci-fi writer Liu Ci-xin. Produced by the Communist Party-owned China Film Group Corp. and directed by Frant Guo, with Liu serving as executive producer, 'The Wandering Earth' riffs on some of the author’s signature themes -- cosmic disorder and existential anxiety, wrought by celestial bodies thrown off-kilter."

So far, so sci-fi.

"The aging sun has become a red giant, threatening to engulf human civilization and the ‘United Earth Government’ has executed an escape strategy known as the ‘Wandering Earth’, a 2,500 year-long plan using giant rocket thrusters (‘Earth Engines’) to unmoor the Earth from its orbit, leaving the solar system to start afresh in Alpha Centauri, our nearest interstellar neighbor," Zhang continues.

"The Earth itself has become a refugee and human civilization has been devastated by a new Ice Age; its dwindling population of 3.5 billion people live in megacities deep underground. Actor Wu Jing (who also starred in 2017’s ulta-patriotic box-office behemoth 'Wolf Warrior 2') is Liu Pei-qiang, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station anxious to reunite with his estranged son, Liu Qi on Earth. Through a series of events triggered by gravitational spikes on Jupiter, the hot-headed Liu Qi finds himself, his trucker grandfather and his kid sister Duo-duo on a mission to deliver a crucial ‘lighter core’ in time to stop the planet colliding with Jupiter.''

This is looking to be a very popular Chinese sci-fi movie. Yes, so far, so Chinese sci-fi.

While according to Zhang writer Liu Ci-xin’s narratives are characterized by breathtaking shifts in scale, executed with scientific and conceptual precision, the new movie ''requires more than a few leaps of faith, sparing no set pieces as it builds to its final climax, and losing most of its ensemble cast to drawn-out death sequences along the way.''

Now make way for some good old Chinese Communist Party propaganda, which by the way, it is very good at.

It turns out that the movie is not only a spectacular ride, it is also fuelled by a steady injection of classic sci-fi tropes, abundant Chinese filial piety and patriotic Chinese-led internationalism, according to Zhang.

"In one pivotal scene, the United Earth Government informs Liu Pei-qiang that the ship’s onboard computer, MOSS (a not-so-distant relative of HAL-9000 from the 1968 Hollywood film titled '2001: A Space Odyssey'), has calculated every possible trajectory and determined that the Earth is to be abandoned. Liu replies: ‘Today is the first day of Lunar New Year, it is meant to be a day of reunion. I refuse to yield.’ In one rousing display of international fraternity, our young heroes inspire ‘Colonel Ryuichi’ (from Japan), ‘Private Ivan’ (from Russia) and ‘Soldier Brian’ (from the USA) to stop deserting their posts and return to duty, in one final push for the planetary cause.''

And here comes Zhang's bold (and welcome) pronouncement: "Perhaps 2019 will be the year that climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’, enters the global mainstream."

It’s about time, the Boston transplant Zhang says -- ''and it would be fitting for China, a leader in clean-energy tech as well as deadly air pollution, to pave the way. While 'The Wandering Earth' sometimes feels like a $50 million Chinese Communist Party propaganda reel, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable ride where the central struggle is not for arbitrary human victory, but the epochal motif of planetary survival.''

Sci-fi, cli-fi. China is really mixing things up and it's good to see. 'The Wandering Earth' has become China’s second highest-grossing film of all time  and  now Netflix -- despite the pNetflix platform NOT being available inside party-controlled Communist China – has acquired the streaming rights for an undisclosed amount of money; it plans to translate the movie into 28 different languages and release it in over 190 countries.

That's clout, that's cli-fi.

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NOTE:

The MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) offers a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology (SMACT), a rigorous and selective two-year graduate program.