Director – Dong Hoon-choi, Screenplay – Dong Hoon-choi & Lee Ki-chul, Producer – Ahn Soo-hyun, Photography – Tae-kyung Kim, Music – Young-gyu Jang, Visual Effects – Beijing Visual Culture Media Co., Ltd., Blaad Studios, Cjes Gulliver Studios, Dexter Studios, Ditus Studio, Gimpville AS (Supervisor – Andreas Lønø), OPIM Digital, SupreVFX (Supervisor – Wu Diyi) & Whitespace VFX Studios (Supervisor – Chen Zhang). Production Company – CJ ENM/Caper Film.
Cast
Kim Tae-ri (Lee Ahn), Ryu Jun-yeol (Mureuk), Lee Hanee (Min Gae-in), Kim Woo-bin (Thunder), Yum Jung-ah (Heung-seol), Jo Woo-jin (Cheong-woon), Shin Jung-geun (Right King), Lee Si-hoon (Left King), Kim Eui-sung (Ja-jang), Jin Seon-kyu (Neung-pa), Kim Hae-sook (Milbon)
Plot
Young Lee Ahn has travelled from the year 2022 back to the year 1391. She has grown up there where her possession of a gun has gained her a reputation but also had her hunted. She seeks the Divine Sword with which she can return to the present. However, various other parties are also seeking the sword and its powers, which are reputed to heal. These include the two sorcerers Heung-seol and Cheong-woon and their companion cats that can change into humans; Mureuk who has strange powers he does not understand; and the masked Ja-jang who houses the invading alien entity. Meanwhile, in 2022, a matter of days before the alien invasion, customs agent Min Gae-in obtains a video of the aliens taking over human hosts and tries to alert people what is happening.
The South Korean SF film Alienoid (2022) was one of the most confusing films I have ever sat down to watch. Most audiences thought so too and it received very mixed reception. Despite such, director Dong Hoon-choi and most of the cast return here with this sequel Alienoid: Return to the Future, which wraps the saga up.
The first film was such a mishmash of wild ideas, flipping between time periods, plot strands and characters. As Part II starts, you are left struggling to pick up the thread and make sense of it. Expectedly, Return to the Future starts out crazed and frequently making no sense. The two sorcerers are back wielding fans that can manifest winds and cause the two cats to transform into people, making life miserable for Ryu Jun-yeol, or else inexplicably causing him to walk up a wall sideways at one point, along with assorted power punches and the use of invisibility cloaks. It makes you think you are almost in a fantasy film, even one of the wacky Wu Xia films popular in Hong Kong in the 1980s/90s, rather than an SF film.
At least, the story in Return to the Future eventually provides a rationale for everything going on where the timelines, the alien invasion, the transforming cats, and everything are all explained. I suddenly clicked to realise that the girl wandering around with the gun is the grown-up kid from the first film and later why we had the cat-human transformations and so on.
Kim Tae-ri in action
That said, even with eventual explanations for what is happening and a wider picture that places everything in context still makes for not the most coherent of films. There is still a lot of running around that drags the plot out where characters do things for reasons that aren’t always clear. The first film at least climaxed with the alien invasion. This introduces another whole subplot set several days before the invasion where customs agent Lee Hanee sees the video of the body snatchers, all before everybody in the past comes through a time portal for more action taking place in the present. At its worst, these scenes degenerate into silly comedy sequences with the two sorcerers amok in a gymnasium battering at running machines. The film ends on a reasonable climax with people fighting tentacle creatures aboard a train and the train being totally demolished.
Director Dong Hoon-choi has elsewhere specialised in the Korean gangster and action film with the likes of The Big Swindle (2004), The War of Flower (2006), The Thieves (2012) and Assassination (2015), as well as work directing videogames. He had made one other genre film with Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009).
