Alienoid
As much as I love intellectual exercises in science fiction, sometimes it’s just nice to watch someone go to town building a reality, and throwing a lot of ideas at the screen for the purpose of entertaining us. The someone in this case is writer-director Choi Dong-hoon, and even when the narrative gets loopy in “Alienoid,” it remains a blast of action and sci-fi world building that has me excited to see what’s next; indeed, a second film is intended to follow up on this one. It has time travel, aliens, parallel narratives and all sorts of action that gives us a hit of the fantastic on a regular basis.
The film begins in 1380 during the Goryeo Dynasty. We see the pursuit of a woman’s body, which is suspended in midair, by warriors. They fire at it, but it’s protected by a field. A modern car comes through a portal, and Guard (Kim Woo-bin) and his robot partner, Thunder- who can sometimes take his likeness- apprehend the alien coming out of the body. They come from a time where aliens lock up their prisoners in human’s brains- this is one of the prisoners. They discover a baby girl nearby, who was the alien’s newborn daughter, but they aren’t supposed to engage with humans. They go back to 2022, where a spacecraft appears in the sky, and unusual happenings begin. Meanwhile, we continue to go back to 1391, where a dosa (Korean tao magician) Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol) and Ean (Kim Tae-ri) try to find the mystical Divine Blade, an object which holds great power. There’s more of a connection to the two times than we think, and both will ultimately be vital to the war ahead.
Sometimes, people just want to be entertained watching a movie. Sure, you can layer in big themes and ideas in if you want, but some filmmakers just want to give you a good time watching a film. While it’s great that filmmakers layer deeper meaning into stuff like superhero movies, ultimately, I watch them to be entertained. There are ideas of destiny and responsibility and self-discovery in “Alienoid,” but ultimately, Dong-hoon wants us to be entertained by this film, and it cannot be stated enough how much I was entertained by this film. The character personalities give us heroes and villains to engage with, the visual effects pop and are wildly- and sometimes, simply- imaginative, and I love the music, which gives us a full range of emotions and tones in this movie, but also anchors it in an emotional honesty that is important when a film is trying to mix so many different concepts into a bigger reality. There is humor, action, pathos and silliness that can come out of this movie, sometimes within the span of a minute or so. This is one of the most purely enjoyable films I’ve seen this year, and its 142-minute running time flies by effortlessly. It’s hard to think anyone wouldn’t just have fun watching this movie. I’ll just be sitting here, waiting for the second film Dong-hoon has in mind for this series to come out.
