Mark Reviews Movies: ALIENOID

Alienoid, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 25, 2022

Writer/director Choi Dong-hoon's Alienoid feels like a lot of movie for a story that both is incomplete and doesn't have much to it. The scope of this tale is significant, as its narrative goes between two different time lines in two different eras, introduces us to a sizeable cast of characters, and revolves around science-fiction and fantasy elements combining in a battle to save the world from aliens.

Choi is clearly having a lot of fun with the basics and specifics of this material, especially as its later acts introduce various snags and re-contextualize the story as we thought we knew it. The whole of the movie, though, never feels like more than the sum of its disparate parts, and again, the whole in this case is only about half a story in the first place.

About half of the plot follows two alien robots in contemporary South Korea: a cyborg named Guard (Kim Woo-bin) and his little, floating companion Thunder. They are essentially prison guards for an alien species, which inject their criminals into humans on Earth. The two can travel through time, too, thanks to a dagger of advanced technology. An opening bit of time-travel to stop an alien in the 1300s results in Thunder rescuing an orphaned baby from the period, and begrudgingly, Guard raises the child, named Ean (Choi Yu-ri), in the modern day.

The other half or so takes place some decades after Guard and Thunder's mission into the past, and it follows Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol), a mystical warrior whose magic is still in its practice stages (He has a magical fan, from which he should be able to pull a pair of swords—although Muruk can only summon a pair of cats). Muruk is looking for a magical blade, and in the process of the search, he leaps and fights like the heroes in wuxia tales. Eventually, he meets a young woman (played by Kim Tae-ri) who can "shoot thunder" from a pistol.

The two sections do eventually come together beyond the existence of the dagger, but for the most part, Choi's repeated cutting between the two time lines only highlights how distinct the plots, tones, and styles of the two plot threads are. The jarring differences between these sections, as well as the constant uncertainty about how such different storytelling goals could fit together, results in a start-and-stop sense of momentum that undercuts Choi's larger flight of imagination.

Once it does become clear how the past and present sides of the narrative actually gel, Alienoid is freer to indulge in the kind of over-the-top fun its structure keeps somewhat a bay. By the open-ended non-ending, there is some curiosity about where the filmmaker will take these ideas in the story's forthcoming continuation (A brief tease promises a sequel sometime next year), but the feeling of being left hanging certainly doesn't help this installment.

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