Too Little Too Late
Choi Dong-hoon tries his damnedest to redeem the off-the-mark ‘Alienoid’.
alienoid: Return to the Future
Director: Choi Dong-hoon • Writers: Choi Dong-hoon, Lee Gi-cheol
Starring: Ryu Jun-yeol, Kim Tae-ri, Kim Woo-bin, Lee Hanee, Yum Jung-ah, Jo Woo-jin
South Korea • 2hrs 2mins
Opens Hong Kong January 25 • IIA
Grade: C+
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: Alienoid: Return to the Future | 외계+인 2부 makes more sense than 2022’s Alienoid did. Not a great deal more, but more nonetheless. Choi Dong-hoon’s inevitable, already in production follow-up to his inventive if ultimately bland sci-fi/wuxia mash-up is the kind of inventive, balls to the wall genre romp Koreans do so well when they feel like it. The Good, the Bad, The Weird, Save the Green Planet! and 2009: Lost Memories were nonsense, but they were fun nonsense, with stellar VFX, excellent casts and, in the case of the latter two, they made a point. Alienoid had most of that in its cocktail but fell short of the mark. Way short. Even still, the last 20 minutes that saw the various threads finally come together and the major players swap time periods did manage to stoke a sense of “What’s next?”
Return to the Future is what’s next, though Choi and co-writer Lee Gi-cheol never answer the question of why the alien entities on the prison ship have to occupy human bodies. The duo trims nearly 15 minutes off the run time, a lot of narrative fat, sidelines some of the plot elements (didn’t a possessed cop travel to the 14th century? Did no one find his body and wonder about the suit?) in favour of a leaner narrative and a more action-focused final product. It’s the right choice, even if it doesn’t help.
Even like this, can’t tell you what happened
After an efficient recap and some fancy voiceover footwork re-establishing the bad aliens’ motives, Choi dives in. The older Ean (Kim Tae-ri, Space Sweepers, The Handmaiden) and her trusty android Thunder/Guard (Kim Woo-bin) are stuck in the past looking for the Divine Blade that will… get them home? Save humanity? Lock up the cons? Something. At the same time, our intrepid budding sorcerer Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol, Believer) discovers he’s actually The Collector, or The Overlord, or The Controller or something. Or not. Anyway he teams up with Ean, a pair of Mages (Yum Jung-ah and Jo Woo-jin), blind swordsman Neung-pa (Jin Seon-kyu) – who’s got a connection to Ean and the first time she time travelled with Thunder/Guard before before – and trusty sidekicks Left Paw and Right Paw (Shin Jung-keun and Lee Si-hoon) to stop the evil Jajang (Kim Eui-sung) – who might also be The Controller? – from… I want to say world domination? But then they have to go the present, 2022, to help customs officer Min Gae-in (Lee Hanee, Killing Romance) stop The Controller (again, really?) from releasing the deadly red haava gas. Oh, and she owns a portrait of Neung-pa somehow. Oh, and they have about an hour to do that. Ow, my head.
That actually sounds more confusing that it really is, in the moment at least, and for all its predictable “person out of time” gaffes and pratfalls Return to the Future has its highlights. The red-shrouded Seoul is truly eerie, the alien creatures are squishy fun, Lee, Yum and Jo seem to be having a good time in their roles and Korean filmmakers have no gripes when it comes to painting authorities as idiots if the story demands it. It’s relatively well paced, even with the longest six minutes of all time dragging out the climax, no one half-asses it, swords will never not be cool, and the big message is hoary but not invalid, about a need to cross time, space, class and gender to cooperate in solving problems for the greater good of humanity. So what’s the problem?
Right there. That’s the problem. It’s impossible to say where either Alienoid’s issues lie because they’re just unremarkable enough to not be great, but not bad enough to Good Bad. The production can’t be faulted, especially when combined they clocked in under US$25 million (how everyone can work with that except for Disney remains a wonder of the modern world); Choi can’t be called to the mat for lack of ambition. It just kind of sits there, taking up space without putting anything substantial back into it. Now, credit where credit is due. Mureuks’s entirely predictable final action sees him back in modern Seoul – there’s a tether to the inn in the past, long story – and I’ll admit I braced for a protracted and unnecessary “comic” epilogue. But no. Choi beat down a filmmaker’s worst instincts and ended Alienoid: Return to the Future exactly where it should have. Chef’s kiss Mr Choi, even if there is a sliver of light for a third. — DEK