Warriors of Future (2022)

Warriors of Future arrives as the most expensive Hong Kong production ever mounted, a military science fiction spectacle in which a giant alien plant named Pandora has taken root in a drowning city and a suicide squad has hours to stop it. The atmosphere is ruined, the population is sick, and the only hope for breathable air is the same botanical menace the squad has been sent to neutralize. This is a genuine environmental engine, not a lecture. The film wants us to care about the air, and it earns that concern by putting a monster in the way of it.

The cultural inventory here is thinner than the budget suggests. Carina Lau's Colonel Tam holds command authority and makes decisions that determine the fate of a hundred and sixty thousand people, though the film never pauses to remark on the novelty of a woman giving those orders. General Li sabotages the mission to save his pet dome project, a small gesture toward institutional self-interest that stops well short of any argument about wealth or power. Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. No character wrestles with identity, no relationship reads as anything other than professional camaraderie, and the entirely Chinese cast is simply the default for a domestic production, not a statement. The film has no interest in the body, the mind, the past, or the politics of who gets to be seen.

It is, in the end, a very loud machine for delivering robots, rainstorms, and armored suits. The sermon is absent. The plant is the message, and the plant does not talk.