Classroom Activities

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Pre-Screening Discussion

The conceptual questions outlined above are complex and intended to help instructors introduce the film and lead class discussion after students have watched the film. In simplified form, they can also serve as pre-screening discussion questions that prime students to watch the film analytically:

  1. What is your understanding of propaganda and soft power? What role do films and television shows play in promoting certain world views?
  2. What do you expect from a science fiction film? How can science fiction films help us think about the future? About our relationship to technology and the environment?
  3. Why is apocalypse/disaster both scary and exciting to watch? This is an ethically thorny question, since audiences may enjoy the spectacle of destruction, but apocalypse can be productive because it allows us also to think about futures in new ways, to imagine new notions of community that are refreshingly different from the world we live in.
  4. A broken family subplot is a cliché in disaster movies. Why pair the breakdown of a nuclear family with a global catastrophe?
  5. How are nations represented in cinema? For example, in a film about American characters saving the world, what kinds of iconography is used to represent the United States and American values?
  6. What notions of global community are you familiar with? In what contexts do nations come together to accomplish a goal?
  7. What media that deals with the end of the world have you consumed? What threatens life on earth and how is the crisis resolved? What does a postapocalyptic world look like?

 

After a brief discussion, students will be ready to watch the film critically. Noticing details that pertain to the questions above as they watch will further equip them to analyze the film in a post-screening discussion and any related writing assignments. Some things to watch for:

  • News broadcasts and narration as world building/exposition
  • Government communications & representations of state authority
  • National and international iconography
  • Mentions of home and family
  • Spaces that are/were homes (underground cities/ruins & memories)
  • Technology as friend and foe
  • Moments of despair and hope (how do we transition from one to the other?)

 

Suggested Sequences for Analysis

Any scene in the film can be used to conduct meaningful analysis. Choosing a sequence and rewatching it helps concretize more abstract conceptual questions, grounding them in the specific audiovisual presentation of the material. Rather than getting lost in the complexity of the whole film, which can be overwhelming, students can focus their attention on a narrow section. To have a productive and fun discussion, it’s necessary to watch chosen sequences closely and pay attention to details, how they work together, and to consider how an extract fits into the film more broadly. In other words, to ask how this particular part of the film works and to explain why this particular part of the film merits careful consideration. Below, I offer a brief look at two sequences in which many of the themes discussed above congeal.

 

  • Opening montage

Opening sequences invite viewers into the world of a film. They work to capture our interest and emotional investment. How does The Wandering Earth draw us in and what kind of world is created in the first minutes of the film? The film opens with a family scene, Liu Peiqiang and his son are camping on the beach and looking at Jupiter in anticipation of the father’s imminent departure to the space station. After this initial familial set up, an off-screen narrator provides the exposition necessary to understand the plot of the film. A montage of scenes, including picturesque nature imagery and footage from international news reports, follows. Toward the end of this narrative and visual exposition, Liu Qi and his grandfather are shown in a throng of people entering the underground city of Beijing. Initially, the crowd appears in long shots while the narrator explains humanity’s flight underground. Such long shots and the off-screen voice have so far produced an impersonal tone. As the mass of people approaches the elevator, however, the film begins to show us Liu Qi and his grandfather in close shots. By returning to the family we saw in the first shots of the film, the fate of the planet outlined in the news montage is reconnected to the much smaller unit of the family.

How can this paragraph be enriched with details and close analysis? Consider:

    • What types of images do we see? What does this combination of various types of footage do? How does it set up the stakes of the film?
    • What is happening in the news broadcasts? Where are these incidents taking place? How are they presented?
    • How are the multiple scales in which the film operates established? The family, the nation, the global community?
  • Shanghai ruins

 When the convoy transporting a crucial device needed to repair and Earth Engine reaches Shanghai, the film indulges viewers with awe inspiring shots of a frozen, ruined city. On one hand, this sequence is an impressive showcase of special effects. Exploring the ruins of the once great metropolis is undoubtedly a visual thrill. At the time, however, the stark emotional stakes of this visit are continually underscored. Younger characters look out the window, awed by a bygone world they barely knew before going underground. The grandfather, once a resident of the city, provides warm, nostalgic narration whose prosaic references to favorite homemade meals contrast sharply with the frozen world outside. Unlike Beijing, which was shown only in its contemporary state as an underground city and over ground infrastructural installation, Shanghai is literally frozen in time, an artefact of a bygone world. The city’s rich history as a cosmopolitan “Paris of the East” seems wholly irrelevant in this new world. Impressive skyscrapers remind viewers that the metropolis was a global economic hub whose growth fueled and echoed China’s rise as a powerful nation, but the grandfather’s narration rejects the pursuit of money as an outdated, practically unethical concern. At the end of this interlude in Shanghai, we discover that Duoduo, the adopted granddaughter, was rescued from the city by the grandfather as it was flooded and destroyed. The film thus presents viewers with another potential “home,” though the nostalgic embrace of home and family is undercut by ruination and the death of the grandfather as the crew escapes a collapsing building.

How can this paragraph be enriched with details and close analysis? Consider:

    • How is the past accessed? How does narration about the past set to scenes of frozen devastation in the present differ from a flashback? How do the characters relate to the past?
    • What sorts of ruins do we see? How are ruins navigated visually?

 Approaches to Essays

Writing about film works most effectively when visual analysis supports the argumentation about what the film means. Close attention to specific moments in the film allows students to tease out tensions and complexities rather than regurgitate generalizations. The goal is to observe details and figure how they work together to produce meaning (as patterns, binaries, etc.). Shifting from deductive to inductive reasoning will help avoid essays that are repetitive and predictable. Even if students begin with an obvious claim, “The Wandering Earth is propagandistic,” requiring them to examine how the film embraces nationalism in reference to specific sequences will give them an opportunity to add complexity to this claim. The book Writing Analytically offers a simple framing that I’ve found to be incredibly useful in teaching writing to incoming undergraduates: “Although X appears to account for Z, Y accounts for it better” (154). This approach adds tension to the argumentation, allowing students to develop a nuanced argument that can account for contradictions and anomalies in the film that they are writing about. The Wandering Earth brims with productive tensions and contradictions that are sketched out in the materials above. First discussing the conceptual questions in class and then adapting them as essay assignments that require students to expand on initial claims and mobilize textual evidence to produce an argument develops critical thinking skills. Going through such exercises especially in relation to a pop culture product can help students relate to content they consume in their everyday lives in a more critical way.

The Wandering Earth in Comparative Perspective

  • Frant Gwo, The Wandering Earth’s director, lists Space Odyssey 2001 (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (dir. James Cameron, 1991), and Interstellar (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2014) as influences.
  • A prequel to The Wandering Earth, Wandering Earth 2, was released in 2022. It can be rented and streamed online.
  • Liu Cixin’s apocalyptic science fiction series, The Three Body Problem, has recently been adapted as a Chinese television program. It is available with subtitles here. A separate adaptation developed by Netflix is set to premiere soon on the platform. The books themselves have been translated and are available at libraries and book retailers.
  • Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” is a fascinating short story about a future Beijing that has grown so large it needs to be “folded up” throughout the day to give various groups of residence space to live. The text is available here in translation. Hao has emerged as another popular science fiction writer in contemporary China. This story’s concern with a compacted city spaces resonates with the underground cities we see in The Wandering Earth.

Supplementary Materials