My review of the movie Restart The Earth (重启地球) which was released in China on 3rd September 2021.
About
Humans developed drugs that promote accelerated growth of plants, however, it all goes horribly wrong as they become sentient and take over the planet bringing the human race closer to its demise.
A global task force to take back the planet is initiated and this is the story of the challenges China faces.
Cast
The following are the two central figures.
Mickey He (何晟銘) plays the lead character Yang Hao.
He is an actor and singer and has a long list of TV productions dating back to 2008 with a handful of films.
A lot of his music can be found on YouTube.
Zhang Ming Can (张明灿) as Yuan Yuan
She is a child actress and one of the best performances in the movie!
Review
Ugh. Where do I start?!
This film reminded me of the Lost In Space episode “The Great Vegetable Rebellion”. The city backdrop looked as though it was from the computer graphic-generated show “Swallowed Star”.
Some of the special effects were quite decent, some just seemed to have been done in a rush all on green screen. I would say the majority of them were ok. The angry vegetables/plants looked like half dragon half snake.
The acting, well, I think the actors did their best with an awful script. There will obviously be many who enjoyed the film, a bit of escapism, so they have to do their best for them.
The script is just awful. The movie did move along, it got stuck on certain things, but did come to a decent conclusion with the time allowed. It was full of cliches and one-liners that can just be dug out of a book like politicians do. I’m not sure what the screenwriter, Lin Zhen Zhao (林珍釗), was thinking with this movie, he actually won an award before, maybe he just needed to churn something out quickly, hope he got paid well.
I really want to be as generous as I can in rating the movie but I can only give it a 1 out of 5.
Where To Watch
You don’t have to pay to watch this, they just put it on YouTube and TubiTV. TubiTV has their copy dubbed in English which sounded really bad.