Thoughts on See You Yesterday and The Wandering Earth

I watched two sci-fi movies on Netflix recently: See You Yesterday and The Wandering Earth.

I really liked See You Yesterday, for being a good time travel movie with a feeling of futility in its commentary on police brutality, and the positive support in portraying two black teen nerds in the STEM field. The basic plot is that two teens, CJ and Sebastian, develop a time travel machine with Ghostbusters-like proton packs, and they go back in time a day early to save CJ’s brother from getting shot and killed by the police. CJ keeps going back several times whenever the timeline doesn’t work due to the limited ten-minute window into the past, and it is a sad and painful look at not only everyday dangers that POC face with police violence and racism, but also that the timelines don’t ensure happy and safe presents, and the ending still gives a feeling of a desperate drive to fix things for the future.

Besides that, I did like the performances of the two main kids, as they were very believable and charming cute nerds, and there’s a fun cameo by Michael J. Fox as their schoolteacher, along with references to Octavia Butler’s Kindred (about a black heroine time-traveling), Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and, as quoted from the AV Club, “Sebastian and his friends peruse a copy of Kwanza Osajyefo’s comic Black, which explores a world where only black people are genetically able to acquire superpowers.” So I would recommend this, but I agree with critics that, for all the fun nerd stuff with the time travel creation, there’s still a sense of melancholy in the film being about the realities of POC and police brutality.

The Wandering Earth is a Chinese sci-fi blockbuster that was a huge hit last year, and is based on a short story by The Three Body Problem author Liu Cixin. I had read the first book in the TBP trilogy, which is mostly physics and hard sci-fi about the Chinese space agency communicating with an alien civilization and the effects of it, and I assumed from the film’s plot description (The sun is dying, and Earth propels itself to another solar system, and survivors live in underground cities), that it would be along the lines of Sunshine or Snowpiercer, like a thoughtful, smart sci-fi film. Nope. It played out more like Armageddon, with overdramatized soap opera acting, cheesy one-liners, goofy comic reliefs, and ridiculous plots about Earth being sucked into Jupiter’s gravitational pull and being on the brink of destruction, with a lot of hero moments of people either sacrificing themselves or pulling off impossible plans to save everyone against a countdown. It was fine to watch as a cheesy popcorn movie, just not the cerebral kind of sci-fi film I thought I’d be getting.