ALIENOID: Bless This Mess

Do you like time travel? Alien invasions? Martial arts? Kim Tae-ri from The Handmaiden? Alienoid, the new science-fiction and action-adventure epic from writer-director Choi Dong-hoon, has all that and more. Perhaps too much more. The first film in a projected two-part series — the second film was shot at the same time as the first and is due next year — Alienoid is jam-packed with jaw-dropping set pieces, great performances, and enough plot for six movies, let alone two.

Back to the Future

The opening narration of Alienoid informs us that in this world, aliens have been using human brains to hold their prisoners captive for centuries. Guard (Kim Woo-bin) is responsible for keeping an eye on the prisoners and cracking down on any breakouts with his robot sidekick, Thunder. When the capture of one escapee during the Goryeo dynasty causes the death of its human host, Guard and Thunder decide to bring the host’s orphaned baby girl with them to the present day in order to better understand the human brain. However, in doing so, they cause a small crack in time and space.

That’s not the only thing going on in Goryeo times, though. A hapless yet talented magician and martial artist named Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol) is trying to track down a legendary sword known as the Divine Blade. However, he faces numerous obstacles, including a mysterious masked man named Ja-jang (Kim Eui-sung) and a young woman wielding a weapon that shoots thunder, Lee An (the aforementioned Kim Tae-ri).

Meanwhile, ten years after being brought out of the past, Guard’s adopted daughter is starting to ask questions about her father, especially when she witnesses the arrival of a group of extraterrestrial convicts being delivered to their human hosts. When the leader of the convicts manages to escape, the crack in time and space bursts open, and the two parallel storylines of Alienoid—the capture of the convicts in the present, and the search for the sword in the past — converge in a storm of chaos.

Out of This World

Director Choi is known for his stylish, star-studded blockbusters, including The Thieves (a glamorous heist film in the vein of Ocean’s Eleven) and Assassination (an espionage film set during Japan’s occupation of Korea in the 1930s). But in Alienoid, this genre-mixing master may have bitten off slightly more than he (and his audience) can comfortably chew. The film is definitely a lot of fun to watch, but there’s just so much going on here that it’s hard to keep track of it all.

For most of the film, the two main plotlines barely intersect, which can make one feel as though one is watching two totally separate movies awkwardly mashed together into one. That the Goryeo storyline is much more entertaining than the present-day one — largely due to Ryu Jun-yeol’s hilarity, Kim Tae-ri’s badassery, and the many magic-infused martial arts sequences — doesn’t help matters. While the present-day sequences often feel derivative in both storyline and design, the Goryeo sequences instantly capture one’s imagination with their wild visuals and frenetic energy, whether it be Mureuk magically summoning a sword from a fan he carries with him or Lee An shooting her way out of a coffin after being buried alive. (The latter is definitely the coolest coffin escape I’ve seen since the Bride punched her way to freedom in Kill Bill: Vol. 2.)

That being said, even if one prefers the look and feel of one storyline to another, the visual effects courtesy of Dexter Studios — who have worked on pretty much every recent South Korean blockbuster of note, from Parasite to Space Sweepers to Escape from Mogadishu — are stellar across the board. The production cost for both parts of Alienoid was reportedly 40 billion won, or close to 30 million in U.S. dollars; needless to say, it looks much better than many Hollywood movies with five times the budget at their disposal, and not just because it has Kim Tae-ri shooting herself out of a coffin. (Did I mention that she does that? I already did? Oh.)

Conclusion

One can applaud director Choi’s ambition and imagination in creating such a unique, complex fantasy world while also wishing that Alienoid had just a little bit less packed into its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Regardless, it will be intriguing to see how it all (hopefully) wraps up when part two hits theaters in 2023.

What do you think? Are you a fan of director Choi Dong-hoon’s movies? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Alienoid opens in theaters in the U.S. on August 26, 2022. You can find more international release dates here.

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