Alienoid: Return to the Future (Oegye+in 2bu)

 I was actually looking forward to the sequel/conclusion/second half of Alienoid, a Korean action movie that uncomfortably mashed together a wuxia epic and chintzy sci-fi spectacle - each half set in separate timelines, cobbled together with a mess of haphazardly plotted time travel and a very poorly thought-out alien conspiracy.

 While the modern sci-fi section was terrible, the wuxia storyline was surprisingly excellent; And by the end it seemed that, with most of the main characters stranded in the past, that would force the sequel to play to its strengths.

 And for all of maybe half an hour, it seems like it's working. The first few scenes follow the mysterious gun-toting woman - who we now know is Lee Ahn (Kim Tae-ri), the kid from the first movie, all grown up (to add to the confusion, there are two timelines set in the past, ten years apart).

 She now possesses a MacGuffin which will allow the evil aliens to return to the future to enact their cataclysmic terraforming plans, so all the bad guys are going after her. Trying to (mostly) help her are Dosa Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol) and his two cat/human hybrid servants and two other magicians played by Yum Jung-ah and Jo Woo-jin.

 That's a very decent setup! All of these characters are fun, and the first fight - against some mercenaries - is a lot of fun, a very traditional Chinese-style fight where Lee Ahn doesn't let her opponent unsheathe his sword. The way it's shot is not great, but the choreography is. The action/stunt director is Sungchul Ryu, returning from the first movie. There's some good wire work later on.

 What follows - which focuses on the sorcerers chasing Lee Ahn - is admittedly not as good, but it's all mostly fun. And then... it all goes to shit.

 First we, uh, return to the future to reunite with Min Gae-in (Lee Hanee). She was an extremely minor character in the first movie, the custodian of Lee Ahn's BFF whose main thing was being 'comically' smitten with Lee Ahn's 'dad'.

 Well, she turns out to be a badass... customs officer, and via an extremely convoluted set of contrivances she finds out about the alien conspiracy. She's also the descendant of a badass warrior monk (Jin Seon-kyu), who was blinded by the aliens when they took over a Dosa monastery.

 By the time we get back to the Wuxia side of things, the plot has spread like an ugly infection, squeezing the fun and joy out of the plot with convoluted revelations about the true nature of several of the protagonists, and more unengaging, effects-based action.

 Once all characters are yanked to the sci-fi timeline it's almost impossible to care about whatever the hell is happening - writer/director Choi Dong-hoon has let all of his worst tendencies subsume everything. All that's left is lousy plotting full of people shrugging off seemingly mortal wounds, terrible jokes, chintzy-looking special effects and deeply unexciting, CGI-dependent action with some occasional posturing. It seems to consciously go for the feel of a Marvel movie.

 It's an ignoble end for something that had a fair amount of potential.

Alienoid (Oegye+in 1bu)

 Aliens - or Alienoids, I guess, but I'm not going to use that word because it's fucking stupid - don't just live among us; They're incarcerated within us.

 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... or like a (non-)oxygen tank that floats behind them.

 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 a 'humorous' sidekick who likes to dress up 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 the whole movie is intrusive and really, fucking tacky; Replacing it would actually improve things measurably.

 I'm not really selling this, am I? Well, it does kind of suck, but there's also plenty of good stuff.

You'll have to take my word for it, but this scene is almost Woo-level cool.

 Alienoid is a movie of two halves. Half a movie of two halves, as 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 Marvel shit, thank you very much. I did like the design of the main alien invader.

 The half set in the past, though, is honestly 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 works more often than not, and the action is very good - not as good as classic wuxia, and it focuses on magic rather than on martial arts (the harry Potter school of kung fu) 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.

 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.