4 Star

A Tribute to Sacrifice.

The first thing you think about when you read Shattered Earth, is this is a disaster film from China, and it is, but it is also a tribute to the ‘Railway Soldiers’ who since 1948 have built the major infrastructure of China. Written and directed by (Li Jun (Jun Lee), Hunt Down) which pits a Father and Son against a series of natural disasters, and do they throw the book at it, it’s a fast and frantic race to save 160,000 souls.

The film starts with a rundown of the geological history of the South West of China, that it has one of the largest Karst (soluble rocks liable to cause sinkholes and underground rivers) formations in the world. Television reports that the Indian Ocean tectonic plates are moving, causing tsunami’s and earthquakes in China.

Hung Yizhou (Yilong Zhu, The Nursery, As Flowers Fade and Fly Across the Sky (TV Series)) and his girlfriend Lu Xiaojin (Junyan Jiao, When Larry Meets Mary, Gone with the Light) are geologists and engineers that are working on a massive transit project, which is for the new high speed railway. They have to span massive ravines and tunnel through vast mountains, and they have been working on this section for the last ten years. They are only a couple of months from the completion date. The head of construction, Ding Yajun (Shu Chen, The Martian, My People, My Homeland) is keen for the project to be going at top speed, so the pressure is high on the shoulders of Director Wang (Jiantao Hong, Bath Buddy, The Beautiful Girl Chaser). He has a huge amount of men and women to motivate as they drill and blast through the mountain, but Hung has to do his geological checks from all the sensors he has dotted all over the region.

It doesn’t take long to get into the danger of tunnelling through a mountain as they start blasting, Hung notices cracks forming and soon water starts blasting the rocks into the tunnel. People evacuate as Hung and Lu start looking for a way of diverting the water, into another void below them.

The other thing on Hung’s mind is that his father is heading to see the tunnel but not him, he believes that his father blames him for the death of his wife many years ago. After work is brought to a temporary halt, Hung goes to check his sensors up the mountainside as the batteries need changing, while Lu goes to meet Uncle Hung off the bus in town.

This is where the proverbial hits the fan, the mountains move as Hung changes the battery on his sensor, and it starts transmitting all the data, ‘unusual activity’. The mountains split and so does the ground, as the town is split asunder by the forces of nature. Stunts and effects are the nature of the film from now on as they all work to save the bridge and tunnel and the town and all those lives. Lots of subterranean action in this all out disaster movie.