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.