“Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.” is the core tenet Christopher Nolan attempted to introduce its audiences within his time-travel sci-fi drama Tenet. But this approach can only work if the director fully commits himself to forego large chunks of exposition and explain everything the audience needs to know through a show-stopping display of image and sound making. Tenet is often cited as the perfect example of “vibes movies;” but there are no vibes to a film that consistently bludgeons its audience with interminable, contradictory exposition, to which its actors muffle through oxygen masks and a (far too) loud sound design.
It’s of course, understandable that most audiences will cite Nolan‘s film as a “vibes movie” because that’s the only cinema they expose themselves to, afraid to venture out in the world and overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles. They only overcome it when a hyped movie like Anatomy of a Fall, Godzilla: Minus One, or S.S. Rajamouli‘s RRR gets an overwhelming buzz from Western audiences. Then they stop doing it when no one talks about a specific international film they need to watch.
Not that these aforementioned films are bad, far from it, but if it’s the only time you’re venturing out into the world of international cinema, then you’re depriving yourself of truly audacious pieces of work. This is especially true of the filmography of Choi Dong-hoon and his Alienoid movies, to which no one outside of South Korea is currently talking about.
[Warning: Spoilers from Alienoid and Alienoid: Return to the Future are below!]
Danger comes for the human race in Alienoid: Return to the Future
It is clearly unintentional, but the arrival of Alienoid and its sequel, Alienoid: Return to the Future, act like direct responses to Christopher Nolan‘s Tenet. The plot for the first film and Return to the Future is head-scratchingly incomprehensible. Layers upon layers of exposition and lore get introduced in the dense 142-minute first installment, where extraterrestrial figures, Guard (Kim Woo-bin) and Thunder (Kim Dae-myung) track aliens who are possessing human bodies to contain them in crystal-like contraptions.
One of these aliens is dubbed The Controller, who wants to take over Earth and release a toxic substance called the Haava, so the planet can be habitable for aliens while simultaneously killing the human race. Guard, Thunder, and their adopted daughter, Ean (Kim Tae-ri/Choi Yu-ri), attempt to stop The Controller from releasing the Haava, which causes them to travel back in time and land in 1391 A.D.. It’s there that a Taoist swordsman, Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol) is looking for a thingamajig called the Divine Blade.
That sounds simple enough, but the film is told in a non-linear timeline, with the film starting in 1380 and then cross-cutting from 1391 to 2022. At first, the narrative doesn’t flow, and none of the introductory parts Dong-hoon establishes in his first installment make a shred of sense: what is the Divine Blade? What in God’s name is the Haava? Why are fifteen different people looking for it in three different timelines?
It’s a total head-scratcher to figure everything out as more moving parts get introduced. It doesn’t take long for you to give up on trying to figure out what the film is showing and instead let yourself be guided through a spiderweb plot that keeps tangling itself. Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.
And once you start doing that, Alienoid then becomes a pure feat of sci-fi filmmaking. It’s an audaciously inspiring, visually striking hybrid of traditional wirework wuxia with a splash of superhero mythmaking; producing some of the most daring images South Korean genre cinema has ever offered with actors at the top of their physical game; giving precisely tactile performances in a series of mind-melting action sequences that your brain can’t physically process. It’s one hell of a wild ride that I would hope audiences would be curious enough to seek out and discover on their own. There’s so much more to offer than the facile tenets of Christopher Nolan‘s time travel movie.
A cinematic experience that defies description from Choi Dong-hoon
Alienoid: Return to the Future takes the galaxy-brained approach Dong-hoon adopted in the first, and cranks it to eleven. The film directly picks up after the events of the first left off, where it was revealed that Muruk is the conduit for The Controller. Muruk and Ean must find the Divine Blade to travel back to 2022 and find Thunder to extract The Controller from him.