The Wandering Earth (2019)

The Wandering Earth (2019)
Chinese Title: 流浪地球
Translation: Straying Earth

 

Starring: Jacky Wu Jing, Ng Man-Tat, Jin Long, Qu Chu-Xiao, Li Guangjie, Zhao Jinmei, Mike Sui Kai, Qu Jingjing, Zhang Yi-Chi, Yang Haoyu
Director: Frant Gwo
Action Director: Yan Hua, Hao Zhenjie
SPFX Director: Ding Yanlai, Eric Xu, Zhao Haoqiang

 

I find the trajectory of Wu Jing’s career endlessly fascinating. He stepped onto the scene at age 18 with the lead role in Yuen Woo-Ping’s Tai Chi 2, made about two years after wire-fu films set in period had stopped being profitable. Despite being touted as having graduated from the same wushu school that had given us Jet Li and Zhao Wenzhuo, it was clear that, at least in Hong Kong, audiences were already satisfied with the Jet Li they had and didn’t need another one—Vincent Zhao could have told them that. Anyway, after that film was a flop, Jacky Wu tried his luck on TV, which had been a better fit for Zhao.

Wu Jing got another chance at the big time in 2001 when he was given an important supporting role in Tsui Hark’s big-budget CGI fantasy The Legend of Zu. I’m sure that Tsui brought him onboard at Yuen Woo-Ping’s insistence, considering that YWP was that film’s main action director. Although that failed to make him The Next Big Thing, Wu Jing kept at it. His next attempt at the big leagues was the starring role in Drunken Monkey, which was Lau Kar-Leung’s last directorial effort and another attempt for the Shaw Brothers to reclaim their past glory. That film was also a flop and appears to be the final attempt at filmmaking from the once-illustrious Shaw Brothers Studio.

Fortune came knocking at Wu Jing’s door when he took on a supporting role in Wilson Yip’s Sha Po Lang (released in the States as Killzone), a Donnie Yen crime thriller that promised to return Hong Kong cinema back to the action heights of the 1980s. Wu Jing played the knife-wielding cop killer “Jet,” and his fight with Donnie Yen in the alleyway is one for the ages. The film was enough of a success around Asia that it transformed Donnie Yen into Asia’s hope for martial arts cinema and gave Wu Jing’s career new life, usually in supporting roles in Benny Chan movies.

Things really took a turn in the second half of the 2010s, when Wu Jing returned to the Mainland. His first film there was an action movie called Wolf Warrior, which featured British Bootmaster Scott Adkins and was similar in tone and style to the Hong Kong action hit First Option. The movie was enough of a success that a sequel was greenlit with a higher budget. Filming in Africa, Wu Jing made Wolf Warrior 2, which simply blew away box office records in both the People’s Republic of China and on the international market.

The Wandering Earth was Wu Jing’s next “big” film, which he helped fund when the studio’s budget ran out. The film was almost just as successful as Wolf Warrior 2 and currently sits on number 5 on the top Non-English Language Films of all time. The movie itself, if I were to be glib about it, resembles an odd mixture of Ishiro Honda’s Gorath and Michael Bay’s Armageddon. It has the former’s faith in humanity’s ability to set aside petty differences when a problem of global scale presents itself, while wallowing in the latter’s tendency toward emotional manipulation and treating every single set piece as an “all or nothing” climax.

The set-up is that by the middle of the 21^st century, the sun has started to expand, causing all sorts of calamities on the Earth. In about a hundred years, the sun will be so big as to make the Earth completely uninhabitable. To save the planet, the nations of the world have formed a single government and have come up with the plan to build motors all over the world that will fly Earth out of its orbit on a 2500-year journey to Alpha Centauri. Cities will be bult beneath these engines with a housing capacity of 3.5 billion, leaving the other half to perish by the tsunami’s caused by a second set of engines meant to keep the Earth from rotating, or simply freeze to death once the planet gets far enough away from the Sun. Also, there is a new International Space Station built with the intention of assisting the Earth in navigating its way through space.

The movie proper begins with an astronaut Liu Peiqiang (Wu Jing) spending time at the beach with his dad (Ng Man-Tat, of Royal Tramp and Heroes Among Heroes) and son, Liu Qi. Peiqiang’s status as an astronaut has guaranteed him two non-lottery passes into the underground city beneath Beijing, which he gives to his dad, Han Ziang, and son—his wife is sick and would not be allowed into the city.

Seventeen years later, the Earth is approaching Jupiter. Part of the Wandering Earth Initiative is to enter Jupiter’s gravity pull and use it to slingshot out of the Solar System at a higher velocity. Things don’t go as planned. A gravity spike from Jupiter pulls the Earth into a collision course of the two planets, with the force of the larger planet’s gravity pulling the Earth’s tectonic plates apart, resulting in earthquakes that disable a third of the Earth Motors. Liu Qi (now played by Qu Chuxiao, of The Yin Yang Master), Han Ziang and their adopted family member, the adolescent Duoduo (Zhao Jinmai), get roped into effort after getting arrested for “joyriding” in a stolen transport vehicle on the Earth’s frozen surface[1]. The three join forces with the military to transport a reactor core to the Earth motor in Hangzhou, near Shanghai.

Meanwhile, Liu Peiqiang is still on the Space Station, coincidentally on the last day of his sojourn in space. While trying to contact his family, whom he now knows is travelling across the icy wasteland that is now the Earth’s surface, the space station’s A.I. computer, called MOSS, pulls a fast one on him and forces him into hibernation. Apparently, the Earth government has a contingency plan for the possible failure to repair the motors and get Earth away from Jupiter, one that even Peiqiang doesn’t know about it. And when Liu’s hibernation is interrupted and he refuses to go back to sleep, MOSS is going to go all HAL on his ass.

Once the Jupiter issue is introduced at the end of the first act, about twenty minutes or so into the film, the movie is a rather dour affair. Much like Armageddon, every single move made by our heroes—the Liu family, some half-Chinese kid named Tim, and the soldiers (whom we’re supposed to care for, but barely even learn their names)—turns into a mini-climax that results in the death of one or more characters. The second act ends with the seeming victory of the inhabitants of Earth quashed by the reality of their situation, so even as they are struggling to put a last-ditch effort into saving their planet, there is an overhanging feeling of despair, with people random killing themselves and stuff like that. The film lacks the typical inclusion of crass Michael Bay humor needed to balance out the seriousness of the predicament, or at least Mimi Leder’s constant feeling of hope that kept Deep Impact strong. The hopelessness introduced at the twenty-minute mark is tangible throughout, only dissipating in the last ten minutes or so.

That said, the action is frequent and well staged, with Donnie Yen collaborators Yan Hua and Hao Zhenjie in charge of the stuntwork. There’s a neat bit where the transporter enters a canyon in the remains of Shanghai, in which the plateau is actually made up of water that froze in between the buildings. To continue their journey, they enter a building and ascend an elevator shaft to reach the top of the “plateau.” I thought that was pretty cool. Moreover, the FX work is quite good all around, boasting the talents of WETA Workshop (The Lord of the Rings films); Pixomondo (Hugo; the Star Trek franchise and Game of Thrones); and More VFX, a Chinese studio that did Double World and The Island. The only effects that I thought were unconvincing, personally, happened at the end following an explosion in Jupiter’s atmosphere when you see a sort of POV shot of thousands of flaming projectiles hurtling toward Earth. But beyond that, the film looks quite good.

My main complaint about The Wandering Earth is that it feels longer than it is. The movie is a good thirty minutes shorter than Armageddon but feels just as long. I think it has a lot to do with the placement of the emotionally-manipulative flashbacks that pop up whenever a character is about to bite the dust or make an important decision. While giving some backstory into the lives of said character, it draws out the scene far more than it needs to. Moreover, every set piece has about three or four things going wrong simultaneously that different characters will need to put themselves in harm’s way in order to address or correct. That means that the movie often has its action scenes wearing out their welcome, no matter how good the FX are or how well the stunts are mounted. A few cuts here and there could have done wonders for the pacing. It’s kinda funny when you think about it: about three to five minutes of well-placed cuts could have made a really good sci-fi blockbuster, as opposed to merely a pretty good one.

---

[1] - This leads to an amusing bit where Ng Man-Tat tries to bribe the guard into letting his grandson and adopted granddaughter go free using vintage porn...by vintage, I mean porn made in the 2010s, when the film was made. Cue the next scene with Ng-Man-Tat sitting in the cell with them.

The 9th Precinct (2019)

The 9th Precinct (2019)
Chinese Title: 第九分局
Translation: Ninth Division

 

Starring: Roy Chiu, Chia-Chia Peng, Chen-Ling Wen, Eugenie Liu, Blaire Chang, Ying-Hsuan Kao, Mario Pu
Director: Wang Ding-Lin
Action Director: Eddie Tsai

 

I’m curious as to where the whole “Supernatural Police Division” storyline started. In the late 1980s, we had Alien Nation, which supposed that police would have a special division involving alien-related crimes. At about the same time, there was Dead Heat (1988), starring Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo. That film had two cops investigating a case involving resurrected corpses, only for one to get killed and resurrected, too. In recent years, Hollywood gave us R.I.P.D. (2013), which was about underworld/dead police officers (played by Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges) being part of special department fighting monsters on Earth. Will Smith was in the movie Bright, which teams a human cop with an Orc cop for otherworldly shenanigans.

Then there’s the Chinese side of things. In 1990, Lam Ching-Ying came out with Magic Cop, in which he was a policeman with extensive training in Taoist rituals, which made him the best fit for crimes involving the supernatural. Before Ip Man, Wilson Yip made 2002, a movie that I once described as “Magic Cop meets Gen-X Cops” (for Hong Kong cinephiles) or “The Ghostbusters meets The Mod Squad meets The Men in Black” (for those with more Hollywood sensibilities. That film revolved around a police unit—consisting of two detectives—for crimes of a supernatural bent.

The 9^th Precinct is a Taiwanese film that plays like 2002, but with more drama and less action. It revolves around a cop named Chen Chiao-Hao (Roy Chiu), who possesses the ability to see ghosts. During a routine traffic stop, Chen and his partner discover a dead body in the driver’s trunk. The latter quickly comes out guns a-blazin’, killing Chen’s partner. He is about to blow Chen away, too, when a female ghost appears and scares the killer. This gives Chiao-Hao enough time to shoot the perp and bring him down. The next day, Chen gets in an argument with his superiors for including that detail about “being saved by a ghost” and turns in his badge in disgust.

On his way out of the police station, Chen is approached by a man named Mr. Chang (Peng Chia-Chia), who gives him the old spiel about “the two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find your purpose.” He invites him to visit the “Ninth Precinct,” a level of the police station that is hidden from sight via the ingenious mechanism of the elevator that is always broken. This hidden precinct is designed to work with ghosts, mainly in the form of investigating hauntings and then helping the ghosts move on with their “lives” so they can be reincarnated. Since Chen has always possessed the ability to see ghosts, he is a good candidate for this line of work. Chen eventually accepts and is partnered up with Mr. Chang and a young lady named Hsueh (Wen Chen-Ling, aka Forest Wen), who often acts as a channeler of spirits—that is, she frequently allows herself to be possessed.

Despite Mr. Chang’s disapproval, Chen gets curious about the identity of the ghost who saved him back when he was a regular cop. According to his new boss, the purpose of the 9^th precinct is help ghosts move on, not personally settle their worldly affairs, even if it does involve murder. Chen disobeys orders and finds out that the identity of his savior specter is Huang Ya-Hui (Blaire Chang), a mistress of a politician who improbably recovered from a horrible car accident. His investigation puts him in contact with a reporter, Ju-Hsin (Eugenie Liu, of Mon…Mon…Mon…Monsters), who happens to be Mr. Chang’s estranged daughter. Another case puts Chang, Chen and Hsueh on the property of Hou Gei, the killer from the first scene. Apparently, a number of young women have been buried there, including Huang Ya-Hui. The fact that all of the women had been checked into a prestigious hospital before their disappearance will soon pit our supernatural policemen against the hospital’s sinister owner, played by actress-singer Sonia Sui.

The best way to summarize the experience of The 9^th Precinct is to say that it is equal parts police procedural thriller, The Sixth Sense and Angel Heart. The film is surprisingly heavy on the drama, with a lot of the ghost sequences being treated with a nice helping of emotion. It’s not quite maudlin, but Mr. Chang talks a lot about empathy being necessary for the job and the filmmakers imbue a lot of the ghostly interactions with sympathy for the spooks. After all, the vast majority of them are not harmful, they are just confused and need a loving nudge in the right direction.

There is a bit of genre juggling, as would be expected from a movie like this made in the Far East. There are some moments of humor, like Mr. Chang firing his gun at Chen after finding him at his daughter’s apartment. An early scene at the 9^th precinct shows a holding pen for the more unruly ghosts, including a jiangshi, or hopping vampire. That was a nice nod to the sort of film that opened the door for later movies like this. A Russian Roulette interrogation scene also has some moments of black humor that made me chuckle. There are obvious moments of horror, including the mid-credits sequence that suggests that there will be a sequel with a…(sigh)…World Ending Event.

There is a little bit of action here and there, most of which is reserved for the ending. The credited fight choreographer is Eddie Tsai, who hasn’t done much of note as an action director, but has done stuntwork in films like Sammo Hung’s My Beloved Bodyguard and Paradox, which was choreographed by Hung. The finale has some brief moments of hand-to-hand combat that are very quick and economical, with the sort of fast-and-simple moves and takedowns that you would expect from a trained cop. There is also a short gunfight in that sequence, too. The Netflix thumbnail for this movie shows Forest Wen wielding what looks like a katana, but don’t expect any swordplay in this: she dispels one ghost with her sword and the rest with her gun (loaded with holy water).

I’d say the film’s biggest flaw is the Character Background Dump that happens right before the climax. Chen Chih-Hao and Hsueh are hanging around the precinct after some MAJOR EVENTS have taken place and start going into their own tragic backstories. It doesn’t feel natural; in fact, it reminds me of a similar scene in The Magnificent Warriors, in which the characters are tied up and start telling the other person’s backstory. This flashbacks here are obviously a bit deeper and well-directed than the dialog dump of that film, but the scenario is similar.

I won’t tell you all to rush out and watch The 9^th Precinct on Netflix, but it does make for a more sensitive and thoughtful sibling to Wilson Yip’s 2002. For me, that was enough.

Shanghai Fortress (2019)

Shanghai Fortress (2019)
Chinese Title: 上海堡壘
Translation: Shanghai Fortress

 

Starring: Lu Han, Shu Qi, Shi Liang, Godfrey Kao Yi-Xiang, Wang Gongliang, Wilson Wang Sen, Sun Jia-Ling, Vincent Matile, Huang Youqi
Director: Teng Huatao
Action Director: Zhang Peng

 

As I’m still taking a break for martial arts movies this month, I decided to watch this big-budget sci-fi film from China on Netflix. I mean, I didn’t hate Warriors of Future, so how bad could this one be. Well, I suppose you could say that it’s not a particularly good film, but it’s not so incompetente so as to make you wish death upon the filmakers. It’s mainly a shallow, unoriginal movie—albeit one that wastes the acting talents of its lead actress, the luscious Shu Qi. If you liked the original Independence Day (1996) and were disappointed that the sequel flopped and crushed your hopes for Part 3, then this would make a good substitute.

Apparently, Chinese fans lacked that sort of 90s nostalgia when this came out in theaters the year before the COVID pandemic struck. Apparently, online reviewers tore this film to shreds—my experience at the Douban website suggests that Chinese amateur critics are the snarkiest people in existence—and the backlash was so bad that director Teng Huatao—whose filmography consists of nothing I care about—had to publicly apologize for making a bad movie. Over here, they just make up excuses, blame streaming and find ways to dox the critics and call them a bunch of neckbeard losers.

The backstory is so simple that I can summarize it in a few sentences (as opposed to the two paragraphs I spent on Warriors of Future). At some point in the near future, a space mission sent by China came back with a huge stock of Vibranium—the film calls it “Xianteng,” but it’s just Vibranium. This allows technology to soar to Wakanda levels of advancement. It also attracts an alien ship intent on stealing it from mankind. After wiping out a number of major metropolises, only Shanghai stands in their way.

We are introduced to four employees of the Shanghai Fortress, all of whom have some basic job of replacing Xianteng batteries or something. The first is our hero, Jiang Yan (Lu Han, who was in The Great Wall), who is the team’s most talented guy and carries a torch for Colonel Lin Lan (Shu Qi, of The Blacksheep Affair and Seoul Raiders). There is his friend Zeng Yu (Wang Gongliang), who has no real discernible personality trait. The female member of the group is Lu Yiyi (Sun Jia-Ling), who has a crush on the fourth member, Pan Hantian (Wilson Wang, of Wolf Warriors).

They have been selected by Lin Lan and General Shao (Shi Liang, who later showed up in Mutation on Mars) to become pilots of a new defense aircraft, which will supposedly be a great boon for the residents of Shanghai when the alien mothership arrives…which is just about, now. The ship uses its city-destroying beam (a lá ID4) on Shanghai, but it’s deflected by the Vibranium-powered shield. After a protracted dogfight between Chinese jets and flying power-suited aliens (called “Predators”), the mothership retreats.

A few days later, the mothership returns. But this time it doesn’t use a SUPER LASER or send in a fleet of “Predators” and “Annhilators,” the latter which looks like a combination of a Terminator Hunter Killer Tank and the Droideka from The Phantom Menace. Instead, a surviving Predator from the last scuffle storms the Central Command base and starts slaughtering soldiers in a scene reminiscent of Aliens. You know what I’m talking about: you have a bunch of trained soldiers are wildly firing in all directions while a smaller, more agile opponent just wipes the floor with them. The quick thinking of Colonel Lin Lan and our heroes allows them to control some drones and destroy the Predator before it slaughters everyone. At the same time, another military team fires the bigger-than-a-skyscraper Shanghai Cannon which severely damages the Mothership. But the aliens haven’t given up yet.

Shanghai Fortress is little more than Independence Day set in a single city, spruced up with scenes and hardware inspired from other films. Interestingly enough, outside of the “spider”-power suits the invaders wear when engaging in personal combat, we never see what they really look like. Nor we do really know why they came to Earth to steal our Vibranium. I mean, if Earthlings got it in space, couldn’t they get it from the same source? I was expecting an Ender’s Game twist in which we learn that the Chinese astronauts were plundering and stealing from other races, thus causing this war because of their own greed. I guess that wouldn’t bode well with the censors. As it stands, there is really no twist to speak of, outside of the usual Chinese tendency to kill off characters usually protected by plot armor in Hollywood.

The thing that irked me the most about Shanghai Fortress is something that I might call the Starship Troopers factor. If you’ve seen that film, you may recall a scene where one of the giant bugs possesses an energy fart can reach space and destroy orbiting ships. One of the soldiers destroys it with a nuclear-grade RPG fired from a bazooka. And despite that weapon’s destructive power, most of the combat is done with glorified M-16s that just results in hundreds of lives needlessly lost. Why not use more of those high-yield RPGs and leave the assault rifles for emergency close encounters? It’s the same line of thought that fuels the notorious question: “If the black box is only thing that survives an airplane crash, why not build the entire plane out of that material?”

During the Predators’ initial attack on the Central Command, the soldiers are fighting back with…regular HK-MP5s. I mean, if your world’s technology was boosted by the discovery of Space Vibranium (not to be confused wit Space Titanium, which is commonly found on the third planet from the Black Hole), why the hell are soldiers equipped with weapons that reached their peak in the 1990s? And even at the climax, the soldiers are fighting an entire army of predators with…you guessed it…glorified M-16s! What heck, folks? If the machine guns on your jets and drones are capable of taking out a predator, why not arm your foot soldiers with something similar? I mean, even the Marines in Aliens had huge-honking machine guns and pulse rifles with depleted uranium slugs.

The personal encounters between the soldiers and the predators were staged by Zhang Peng, who cut his teeth in the action industry by helping Corey Yuen Kwai out on The Twins Effect 2. The fights are nifty, and I imagine that they got some super-acrobatic wushu stylists to beat the hell out of the other stuntmen and then green-screened or white-dotted or whatever the stylists to look like six-armed aliens in metal suits. The only thing that keeps me from enjoying these scenes more is the aforementioned Starship Troopers approach to battle tactics.

Beyond the action scenes and consistently solid CGI effects, there’s not much to recommend this movie. The romance subplot doesn’t really go anywhere. Shu Qi’s abilities are wasted, leaving us viewers to stare, trance-like, at her full and luscious lips and wish that they would be pressed against…oh, I was distracted there for a moment. The other actors are pretty people and are likable, in spite of being severely underwritten. Shanghai Fortress is very, very shallow entertainment, but I didn’t regret the time spent watching it.

Warriors of Future (2022)

Warriors of Future (2022)
Chinese Title: 明日戰記
Translation: Tomorrow’s War

 

Starring: Louis Koo Tin-Lok, Lau Ching-Wan, Carina Lau Ka-Ling, Philip Keung Hiu-Man, Tse Kwan-Ho, Wu Qian, Wan Guopeng, Nick Cheung Ka-Fai
Director: Ng Yuen-Fai
Action Director: Jack Wong
SPFX Directors: Chas Chau Chi-Shing, Leung Wai-Kit, Kwok Tai

 

Warriors of Future is basically a Hollywood action-science fiction blockbuster...that happens to be made in Hong Kong with a Chinese cast and crew. However, the storytelling is a mixture of elements of Other movies, ranging from Bat 21 to Aliens to Highlander 2, not to mention our heroes running in powerful robo exoskeletons like Starship Troopers—the novel and the third film. Despite featuring a Hong Kong action diretor—Jack Wong—in the credits, the action is more Hollywood, with ever single set piece being treated like a clímax to a normal movie. That is very much a Michael Bay or Steven Sommers way to approach a film.

The backstory goes as follows: at some point in the near future, humanity perfected the art of Building robots, which means that wars became more commonplace because you obviously didn’t have to worry too much about sending conscripts to die by the thousands. As the number of wars grew, the waste of natural resources plus whatever the hundreds of thousands of explosions was doing the atmosphere, compounded with humanity’s normal polluting ways, threatened to suffocate humanity into extinction.

That’s where we came up with Skynet, a system of dome-like structures that protected the lower atmosphere from pollution, so that people could go on living without choking themselves out of existence. Some time after Skynet was built, a meteor struck Hong Kong—or some unnamed Chinese metropolis—landing specifically in Sector B.16. The meteor was carrying an alien form of plant life, later christened “Pandora”, that grew like the dickens whenever exposed to water. While a ginormous system of alien vines could be a real hassle when it’s knocking over buildings every time it rains, there is a silver lining: Pandora is capable of absorbing pollutants and converting them into regular hydrogen.

The film tells the story of a team of Air Corps soldiers who are given a mission: Discover the location of Pandora’s pistil so that a pair of robot tanks can fire a “gene bullet” into it. What is a gene bullet, mind you? It’s a chemical that will alter the genetic structure of Pandora so that it stops growing whenever exposed to H₂O, but without losing its pollution consumption abilities. The soldiers, led by Taylor (Louis Koo, of almost every single HK film made in the past 10 years) and Johnson Cheng (Lau Ching-Wan, of Black Mask and Call of Heroes), have a tight deadline to work on. In a few hours, a storm front will reach the city, dumping enough precipitation to make Pandora expand past B.16 into the neighboring sector, endangering the lives of more than five million people. Oh, and if the gene bullet doesn’t work, there is Plan B: detonate a thermonuclear weapon inside B.16, which will not only kill Pandora, but everybody living dear the quarantine zone—this is a secret mission, so no chance for evacuation.

And so it goes, with FX man-turned-director Ng Yuen-Fai treating the story the same way Michael Bay might do. There are five major set pieces, which take up the bulk of the film’s rather scant 100-minute running time. The first one sets the story in motion, as the Air Corps fire a chemical contrast into Pandora and follow its progress through the vines in order to find the pistil. The sequence has the aircraft flying between buildings and trying to avoid deadly giant vines as they follow a change in coloring of the vines. The scene ends with the mission being compromised thanks to treachery from a major supporting character and Taylor being left on his own with an unexperienced communications officer named Connor (Wan Guopeng).

The action moves to a hospital, where Taylor and Connor try to help an injured comrade, only to discover that the building is infested with man-sized, quadrupedal lizard-roaches. This is where the movie goes all Aliens on us, complete with a little girl (Mortal Ouija’s Cheng Xiaoxa) who had been living in hiding for who-knows-how-long. That’s followed by another death-defying visit to a collapsing building…and let’s not forget the robot soldiers, which are in control of the traitor. Okay, since the film doesn’t make any attempt to hide his identity, I’ll just tell you that it’s Major-General Sean Li, played by Nick Cheung in a bland, one-note performance. There, I said it.

Because the bulk of the film consists of over-the-top, FX-laden action sequences, don’t expect much in terms of character development or deep thought about the environment or the ethics of blowing up a nuclear weapon in the middle of an urban sprawl. This movie doesn’t even pay lip service to the logistics of nuclear warfare…at least Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day talks about radioactive fallout during a drunken rant. The characters here estimate 160,000 deaths in the initial blast radius, but completely ignore stuff like the shock wave created by the explosion or, of course, the resulting fallout.

Lau Ching-Wan and Louis Koo play veteran soldiers with differing temperaments. The latter lost his daughter to cancer, so he is a perpetual “sourpuss,” to quote Johnson Cheng. He does get a shot at redemption in the form of Pansy, the girl in the hospital, not too unlike Ripley getting a second shot at motherhood in Aliens. Lau is a bit more laid back, but he still gets in on the action when push comes to shove and swings a mean hatchet. Connor, the ineffectual communications guy, slowly develops courage as the film progresses. There is also a former soldier named Skunk (prolific character actor Phillip Keung, of Dynasty Warriors and a lot of Category III films) who helps our heroes, too. Carina Lau is also along for the ride, looking younger here than she did ten years ago in Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame.

The action is mainly of the shooting-and-explosions variety, although there are a few brief moments of punching and kicking and knife-fighting when our heroes are attacked by the re-programmed robot soldiers in the second half. Don’t expect much vintage HK-flavored action, though. This is a Jade Screen-equivalent to an action opus that you’d get from the likes of Jonathan Liebesman.  That said, I have to applaud the special effects: I’m not sure how well they looked on the big screen, but on Netflix, they were generally consistent and bereft of the usually-embarrassing attempts at CGI fire and explosions that hinder most contemporary Chinese movies. The robots, insect monsters, explosions and over-the-top car stunts all look quite good, even by Hollywood standards. I never felt myself being yanked out of the movie because of the action and effects, although Nick Cheung’s bored performance threatened to do on a couple of occasions (give me his Connected cop character anytime).

If you enjoy a turn-off-your-brain Hollywood blockbuster from time to time, like your Oblivion’s; your Skyline’s; or your Battle Los Angeles’s, than check out Warriors of Future. It’s a reasonably fun little movie.