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Just watched The Wandering Earth with my wife last night, and my god, is it bad. The main characters are unlikable and annoying, the plot all over the place and full of holes, the third act in the end totally unnecessary, the finale absolutely unbelievable and the science so bad, even Anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers have better, more compelling and more sound science behind them.

For those who wonder about what's so bad with the movie's science, let me list just a few:

Spoiler!
  1. The Sun turning into a Red Supergiant within 300 years. Neither can t happen so fast nor does the Sun have enough mass to even become that big.
  2. Earth get pushed by "rock fusion", essentially burning rocks for fuel. Those are not only way too weak to work, they would have consumed the entire planet before reaching destination. It even leaves a giant trail of gasses behind like a comet...
  3. When passing by Jupiter, it does a "gravity spike" - as if Planets could change their gravity at will...
  4. Jupiter soaks away the atmosphere in a way that looks like a worm tunnel
  5. The main characters want to ignite the atmosphere and Jupiter along with it to get a push away from the planet to save the earth, nevermind that it would scorch the earth and everyone on it and tha blast would make giant earthquakes enough to destroy all those underground cities in the movie. But the worst part:
  6. The plasma beam is 5000 km short and thus fails even though it stays on like that. Wasn't the earth supposed to crash into Jupiter? The distance would have disappeared just a couple minutes later...
  7. The solution: have the accompanying Space Station, which houses all of earth's knowledge, seeds of all the plants and 300k embryos to ensure the survival if earth itself couldn't make it, drop all those things and crash right into the beam to have it's 300 kT of fuel do the ignition.
  8. Earth comes out unscathed from all of this.

The worst part: It's the second-highest grossing movie in China despite all those flaws and holds a stupefying 74% on Rotten Tomatoes.