4 Stars (out of 4)

Alienoid 2: The Return to the Future opens in North American theaters January 26, 2024
Alienoid is out there to hire on Amazon Prime or stream on Kanopy

I’m venturing out of Bollywood for this assessment as a result of I like the Alienoid films a lot. I’m combining Alienoid and Alienoid 2 in to a single assessment, as a result of they inform one full story and have been filmed collectively–type of like Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2.

Author-director Choi Dong-hoon’s duology Alienoid and Alienoid 2: The Return to the Future defies style, as a result of the movies include components of almost each style. Calling them historical-action-fantasy-thriller-sci-fi-martial-arts-comedy-time-travel-family-dramas comes fairly shut. Choi pulls off his audacious mission with unbelievable finesse.

Within the model of actuality that Choi presents within the movies, Earth serves as a jail for prisoners from an alien civilization. The aliens implant their prisoners into the brains of people who reside their lives unaware of their cranial stowaways. When the people die, so do the prisoners, who can’t survive greater than 5 minutes in Earth’s environment.

Occasional breakouts occur — ensuing within the violent alien controlling its human and rampaging exterior its human cage (in five-minute bursts) — so a Guard (Kim Woo-bin) stays on Earth to recapture escapees and decrease casualties and witnesses. Prisoners are sequestered in numerous time durations, so Guard makes use of his shape-changing laptop/automobile/doppelgänger sidekick Thunder (additionally Kim, belief me, it is smart) to journey wherever and every time he’s wanted.

The story begins in a Korean village in 1380. Guard and Thunder battle and seize an escaped prisoner whose human host dies within the melee, forsaking an toddler daughter. They bring about the infant with them to the current — Seoul, 2012 — and lift her, naming her Lee Ahn.

Ten years later — Seoul, 2022 — and perceptive 10-year-old Lee Ahn (Choi Yoo-ri) suspects that her “Dad,” Guard, isn’t human and that his automotive may be sentient. Her curiosity places her in peril when the lethal alien prisoner The Controller is delivered to Earth, and his lackeys try and free him. After a devastating assault on town, Guard and Thunder seize Lee Ahn and journey again to 1391 to lure The Controller prior to now. However issues don’t go as deliberate.

The story cuts between scenes in up to date Seoul and a Korean city circa 1400, the place the primary character is a magician named Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol). There’s a giant bounty for one thing known as The Divine Knife, and Mureuk needs to seek out it and money in. However males way more harmful than Mureuk are additionally in search of the knife, as is a phenomenal thief (performed by Kim Tae-ri). Quickly sufficient, Mureuk is in over his head.

With all of the aliens, robots, and spaceships, you’d assume director Choi would content material himself to remain within the realm of science fiction. However magic may be very actual on the earth of Alienoid, and the characters who wield it are a few of the finest, funniest characters within the films. Mureuk himself is hilarious due to Ryu’s deft bodily comedy. Mureuk’s two sidekicks — Left Paw (Lee Si-hoon) and Proper Paw (Shin Jung-geun) — are a pair of cats who reside in his magical fan and might flip into people (belief me, it is smart).

Then there are the Sorcerers of the Twin Peaks, Heug-sol (Yum Jung-ah) and Cheong-woon (Jo Woo-jin), the movie’s most dependable comedian aid. Like Mureuk, their laughs sometimes come from the unintended penalties of their very own spells. Whereas they’re nice within the first film, they’re full scene-stealers within the second.

Lee Hanee additionally deserves reward for enjoying the flirtatious single aunt of certainly one of Ean’s faculty associates.

The primary movie does the heavy lifting from a plot standpoint, which is smart with a narrative this dense. The second film supplies some completely different viewpoints on occasions from the primary and introduces an essential new character: a blind swordsman performed by Jin Seon-kyu, who additionally needs the Divine Blade.

Each movies efficiently mix comedy, character progress, and motion to keep up story momentum. There isn’t a uninteresting second in both Alienoid film. Motion sequences vary from comical hand-to-hand fight to large-scale scenes of destruction that really feel extra tangible and impactful than a lot of the city-wide carnage in current Hollywood superhero movies.

Alienoid 1 & 2 are completely immersive, however they’re additionally one thing to marvel at from a meta perspective. As giddy as I used to be whereas watching, it was arduous to not marvel at how Choi manages to make all of the disparate components of the story work collectively so seamlessly. However the mechanics of how he does it finally don’t matter, when the films are so darn a lot enjoyable.

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