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This 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.

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