In Alienoid's barely sensical cosmology, the human mind is the ultimate alien prison. A warden alien stationed on earth takes receipt of hundreds of prisoners from his home planet every so many years and injects them into our minds. He's also tasked with hunting them down should they take control of their host and try to flee (they can manifest outside the host, carrying the floating human body like a helium balloon; it's a pretty cool/silly image). Earth's atmosphere is poisonous to them, so they can't just ditch us completely - they have to wear us like a suit.
I'm not really selling this, am I? Well, it does kind of suck, but there's also plenty of good stuff.
Alienoid is a movie of two halves. Well, half a movie of two halves - it ends in a cliffhanger, pending completion later this year. In any case - half of the story takes place in the modern age, the other half in the late fourteenth century.
That's just the premise; This is a deeply, deeply convoluted and extremely dumb movie.
The alien warden (Kim Woo-bin) is also a time traveller, and is accompanied by a wise-cracking floating robot who likes to take on his form - this allows Woo-bin, who plays the warden as a serious, no-nonsense stick in the mud, to also play broad caricatures in goofy suits. The first time he does that the soundtrack goes into full wacky mode. While I'm on that subject - the score for this is intrusive and really, fucking tacky; Replacing it would actually improve the movie measurably.
The alien warden (Kim Woo-bin) is also a time traveller, and is accompanied by a wise-cracking floating robot who likes to take on his form - this allows Woo-bin, who plays the warden as a serious, no-nonsense stick in the mud, to also play broad caricatures in goofy suits. The first time he does that the soundtrack goes into full wacky mode. While I'm on that subject - the score for this is intrusive and really, fucking tacky; Replacing it would actually improve the movie measurably.
I'm not really selling this, am I? Well, it does kind of suck, but there's also plenty of good stuff.
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| You'll have to take my word for it, but this scene is almost Woo-level cool. |
Alienoid is a movie of two halves. Well, half a movie of two halves - it ends in a cliffhanger, pending completion later this year. In any case - half of the story takes place in the modern age, the other half in the late fourteenth century.
The modern story is honestly pretty shitty: a very kid-friendly FX-heavy adventure that I honestly struggled to muster any interest for, starring the warden, a ten-year old adopted kid sidekick (Choi Yu-ri), and the comedy robot. It's mostly about the kid figuring out what's going on with her 'dad' (which means we get reams of crappy exposition) just as he has to deal with a ship full of rebel alien mutants destroying large chunks of Seoul. The action has its moments but the CGI is very variable, with an unfortunate propensity to have extremely unconvincing humanoids fighting each other. I've had enough of that shit with Marvel, thank you very much. I did like the design of the main alien invader, though.
The half set in the past, though, is kind of amazing. It's a ridiculously entertaining wuxia-style series of events that follow bounty hunter/bumbling apprentice dosa (the Korean version of a cultivator, as far as I can tell) Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol) as he tracks down a mystical dagger. Jun-veol makes for a very likeable doofus, and he has a real knack for physical comedy. Miraculously, the script actually follows through and provides him with some honest-to-god funny material!
The humor is extremely broad, as usual, but it does work, and the action is very good - not as good as classic wuxia, and it focuses on magic rather than on martial arts, but it's exciting and very well staged. The scenery and magical mayhem are top-notch - imaginative and full of cool and funny ideas. A lot of Mureuk's wizardry, for example, comes from his painted fan - he pulls out weapons and magic from it, including two cats who shape-shift into sidekicks and accompany him for most of the movie. I love this sort of thing.
The plot gets a lot less exposition-heavy than the modern-day storyline, too, at least until the closing moments, so of course it's gonna overcomplicate things with weird asides and ridiculous secondary characters, some of them delightful (plus: a little-seen but often-referred to character goes by Dog Turd).
Even when the main plotline comes to the fore it's more fun, as it allows a love interest / time traveller (Kim Tae-ri, getting a lion's share of cool moments) to pull out a gun in the middle of a brawl in an ancient Korean estate.
That's not to say that the main story gets interesting, but at least it doesn't spend all of its time tangling itself into unsatisfying knots. It's an excellent take on modern wuxia, and it more than makes up for the soul-less modern half.
It's a shame that writer/director Choi Dong-hoon is so enamored of his crappy narrative, as he can tell a hell of a ripping story when he's not preoccupied with conveying the inane particulars of the alien's masterplan.
It's a shame that writer/director Choi Dong-hoon is so enamored of his crappy narrative, as he can tell a hell of a ripping story when he's not preoccupied with conveying the inane particulars of the alien's masterplan.
The good news is that it seems like the sequel will be led by the more likeable characters; Given how good they, and the mayhem that surrounded them, were here, that's definitely something to look forward to.
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