Alienoid: Return to the Future (2024)

The second chapter of Choi Dong-hoon's Alienoid saga arrives with the swagger of a production that shot two films across 387 days and still cannot quite explain itself. We begin trapped in the distant past, hop to the present, and sprint toward a time gate while a substance called haava counts down from forty-eight minutes. There are alien prisoners lodged inside human bodies, a blind swordsman hunting a Divine Sword, and mages who suspect the wrong man of harboring an extraterrestrial. The plot is wildly incoherent. It is also, intermittently, a good time, provided we accept that coherence was never the goal.

Kim Tae-ri's Lee Ahn stands at the center of the mayhem, sword in hand, leaping between centuries with the competence of a seasoned action lead. That a woman carries a blockbuster of this scale is notable in the abstract, though the film never frames it as anything but casting. She is a hero who happens to be a woman, and the screenplay treats the matter as settled. The rest of the ensemble is a Korean cast in a Korean production, an arrangement so unremarkable it warrants no comment, and the film offers none. No lecture interrupts the swordplay.

Instead of a message, the film delivers folklore welded to science fiction, a blend that Korean audiences rewarded with a domestic chart-topping run. Western viewers without grounding in the rules of Korean fantasy magic will flounder, as one critic observed, and they will do so without any assistance from the screenplay. The result is a sequel that wants only to entertain, and mostly does. It has no interest in our current cultural arguments, no sermons to deliver, no causes to advance. For a certain exhausted viewer, that absence lands as a small mercy.