This is playing in 3D IMAX at my local AMC so I saw it today ("free" thanks to A-List) before Lego Movie 2 takes over. It was released at the start of Chinese New Year.
Its batshit insane, the plot is that in a few decades its discovered our sun is gonna turn into a red giant soon and so the governments of Earth get together and decide to move Earth to another star. By attaching 4500 engines and pushing. They'll use Jupiter as a gravity slingshot to accelerate to enough speed. Yes, all that is the setup in the first 2 minutes. Of course being any disaster movie bad shit goes down and this is the movie.
It was fun and goofy, reminded me a lot of those disaster movies in the 90s I enjoyed. The remarkable thing about it is that the CGI was pretty good, at least 90% of it, fairly equivalent to Hollywood standards. A few scenes were pretty bad but mostly closeup type of work.
Pretty much the entire cast and backdrop is Chinese, there are a few foreigners but all minor characters. Kind of eye opening to see a big blockbuster from "the other side", like how foreigners must see stuff like Transformers or Independence Day with its American drumbeat, here its all China all the way. Maybe its racist but I honestly couldn't tell one character apart from another, but it didn't really matter its far less about the characters than about being heroic and science is awesome.
The movie is based on a book by Cixiun Liu, who was the guy behind the Three Body Problem set of novels which is a fantastic space opera series that is very, very different than Western scifi novels. I believe amazon is adapting TBP to the tv screen.
Anyways if you love big soap opera sci fi I think you'll enjoy this, its weird and quiite different than traditional Western blockbusters in setup and story beats and tropes but all the space shots were totally worth it. Pretty good in 3D as well, although today is probably the last day its playing in IMAX in NA theaters.