China: A Train Ride You Might Want to Skip

Is it worth your time?

If you have a weirdly specific obsession with civil engineering or just want to stare at mountains for ninety minutes, you’ll probably dig this. If you’re looking for Mickey Rooney to actually do anything, look elsewhere. Honestly, this is for the crowd that likes watching those slow-TV documentaries on loop while they fold laundry. Everyone else? You’ll be asleep by the first mountain pass. 😴

The whole premise is the Tibet Qinghai Express. It’s the highest railway on earth, which is a neat fact, but the movie spends a lot of time just… showing tracks. Sometimes the camera pans across a snowy peak for so long that I forgot I was watching a film and thought I was back in a high school geography lecture. There’s no real tension, just a lot of very steady, very wide shots.

The inclusion of Mickey Rooney and Walter Lantz feels like a total fever dream. They show up, they look confused, and then the movie immediately pivots back to footage of iron wheels grinding against steel. It’s jarring. It’s like watching The Big Party and having the characters suddenly stop dancing to discuss geological soil stabilization. Why are they here? Nobody knows.

Odd observations from the tracks:

• The sound design is mostly just wind and the rhythmic clacking of the train, which is weirdly hypnotic until it isn't.
• There is a sequence where the train passes a village that lasts about three minutes too long. You can see one guy waving at the camera, and he just keeps waving until he’s a tiny dot. It’s awkward.
• The colors in some of the high-altitude shots look slightly off, like someone cranked the saturation up in post-production until the sky looked like neon blue raspberry syrup.

The movie tries to convince you this is a grand, sweeping epic. It’s not. It’s a very expensive home video of a train trip. It reminded me a bit of the pacing issues in The Wrecker, but without the actual wrecks. Just a lot of forward motion.

I found myself wondering if they just strapped a camera to the front of the engine and went to grab lunch. There’s a lack of human touch that feels almost intentional. You’re just looking at landscape. Then you’re looking at more landscape. Then, suddenly, a cut to a talking head that doesn’t say anything particularly profound. It’s just there.

Don't go in expecting a story. This is a collection of footage held together by the thin hope that you find trains as impressive as the producers do. It’s not bad, just… empty. 🏔️