The Wandering Earth

The Wandering Earth is a movie very much in the vein of Armageddon, in that it is a sci-fi movie with an utterly ludicrous premise you can either roll with, or you can't.

The premise is that the Sun's core has destabilized, and Earth will be uninhabitable in 100 years unless they build 10,000 fusion engines on the surface of the Earth and launch the entire planet to Alpha Centauri, a journey of 2,500 years. They try to use Jupiter's gravity for a slingshot maneuver, but a gravitational spike causes lots of engines to shut down and the Earth begins to spiral in towards Jupiter. The movie follows a ragtag group of mismatched people trying to get one of the engines running, and running into all sorts of complications.

There's a whole thing where Liu Qi, is this teen genius/delinquent, who has a lot of anger at his father who works on the space station that precedes and monitors Earth, and that's how he, his adopted sister, and their grandpa wound up in this mess in the first place. Meanwhile, his dad is up on the space station, figuring out what the people on Earth are being told doesn't match the measures the station's AI (which is basically 2001's HAL, right down to killing crew members that interfere with its hidden directives) is taking.

The problem is, the stuff that goes on in this movie is so ridiculous I'm watching to see what stupid-ass thing they come up with next. But the movies keeps stopping to try and make me care about the characters, and I'm not having it. Here's Space Station Dad, trying to convince the United Earth Government to let him do some crazy shit, and I'm thinking, either do the crazy thing, or go back to the people on Earth trying to ignite Jupiter's atmosphere to create a shockwave to push Earth away from it.

I'm really not sure how Earth is even going to exist by the time they reach Alpha Centauri. There are hundreds or thousands of these huge trucks for hauling rock to the fusion engines constantly. The engines are supposed to run for the first 500 years, until they reach half the speed of light, then coast 1300, then spend 700 years slowing down to achieve stable orbit. That's a lot of material to burn. I'm really not sure how Earth is going to be left at all. And wouldn't the atmosphere freeze and fall to the surface once they get far enough out? Or are the engines producing that much heat?