Fantastical infrastructure imagining : The Meg and The Wandering Earth as global science fiction cinema in the age of China’s rise

ABSTRACTThis study is prompted by two of the most famous Hollywood blockbusters set above and below the ocean—The Abyss (1989) and Waterworld (1995). These films tell us something about catastrophic environmental degradation as much as they point us to the cultural power that is embedded in deep-sea structures and vehicles: the underwater drilling platform, built-up steampunk atolls and submersibles. The continuation of this fantastical infrastructure imagining occurs out at sea in The Meg (2018) and underground in The Wandering Earth (2019). As new Chinese science fiction films, each provide representations of other high-tech complexes—from an underwater research facility to massive Earth engines—each vying to show the struggles over technological ingenuity being usurped for military purposes. Thus, premonitions of China’s rise out at sea and off-world are argued to relate to its recent construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea. This is formulated by me to be a part of a “baseworld phenomenon.” An additional two tropes coalescence with The Meg and The Wandering Earth: mainly, that these films are part of an ever-expanding corpus of global SF cinema. Throughout the essay, the concept of “cultural pillarization”, where worlds created for Chinese audiences are partitioned and multiculturalism is compromised, is also analyzed.KEYWORDS: The MegThe Wandering Earthfantastical infrastructure imaginingglobal science fiction cinemabaseworld phenomenonhydrogeographiescultural pillarizationChina-hollywood co-production Special termsTableDownload CSVDisplay TableNotes1 For example: incursions into other Asian air spaces such as South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan (BBC 2022; Reuters Citation2022); a flash conflict on its mountain border with India, where special forces from both sides perished after falling to their deaths during the skirmish (NYT 2021; Gettleman and Myers Citation2021); to its creation of its own baseworld phenomenon at the edges of its dominion through the construction of seven artificial islands since 2015.2 With the US, NATO, and Japan, alongside other Pacific Rim military alliances now trying to contain China’s military ambitions, some commentators in and outside of the postsocialist country rightly chastise these hypocritical calls, given Europe, Japan, and America’s past exploits related to colonialism and pre-emptive strikes.Additional informationNotes on contributorsKeith B. WagnerKeith B. Wagner is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Media Communication at Sungshin Women’s University in Seoul, South Korea. He was formerly Assistant Professor at University College London and held a visiting professorship in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He is the co-editor of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (Routledge, 2011), China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, and Interaction (Phaidon Press, 2020), Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2022) and Global London on Screen: Visitors, Cosmopolitans and Migratory Visions of a Superdiverse City (Manchester University Press, 2023). Currently, Dr Wagner is completing two new books: Inimical Excesses in Global Cinema and Retheorizing Cinema’s Multiple Globalizations.