FAQ

With subtitle of English, But I'm sorry that the subtitle-scoll is so fast that you cann't pay enough attention to the story itself.

But, I would like to suggest you can watch it twice: one just for the picture without subtitle-chasing, then with the question get answer from the web, go and enjoy yours twice ^_^

The movie is based on an award-winning novella with the same name, written by the famous hard Sci-fi writer, Liu CiXin, back in 2000. The novella tells a story from a student's viewpoint. The time is actually much later than the movie's timeline. It's mostly about what he sees and feels when the Earth is almost out of the the solar system.

He's the most famous contemporary hard Sci-Fi author in China. Started writing from the 80's, his famous works including long novels: "The Chronicle of the Supernova", "Lightning Balls", "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy, novellas: "Ground Fire", "Wandering Earth", "Countryside Teacher", and "Truth in the Morning"... etc. His works all have distinctive style of wild imaginations based on scientific theories. While lacking detail interactions and emotions between characters, the unsurpassed scale and vivid description of events makes up the lacking. Thus reading his novels is like reading imaginary future history books.

The original novella author Liu CiXin did talk about it in detail. 1. The first proposal was building big space ships. However, after some insider leaked out that each seat in the space ship would have cost 30 million US dollars, a civil unrest broke out and overthrew that proposal. 2. The second proposal was the one we see in the movie. The advantage is: A. They don't need to find a planet that has all the right environment for human. They just need to go the nearest one and park the Earth in the right orbit. So instead of wandering probably millions of years in space, they just need 2500 years to reach the nearest start system. B. By digging huge underground shelters, the frozen earth can carry billions of people, instead of millions. C. Even frozen, the Earth has plenty of resources for energy and material to sustain billions of people for a long time. D. The frozen Earth is the perfect shield against many space hazards like meteorites. The disadvantage is: A. the Earth is too big. It needs tremendous power to push it out of the solar system. It takes a long time to accelerate and decelerate. B. Other planet's gravity might have unexpected effects on earth when it's close, like the movie depicts. C. Unlike the approach of many big spaceships, there is only one big planet. There is no backup or plan B.