Alienoid

Science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's third law of SF writing states that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Time-hopping interplanetary romp Alienoid refuses to choose between the two, instead establishing a temporal tunnel between modern South Korea and a mystical version of the waning years of the kingdom of Goryeo in the 14th century.

The connection between the two seems very slight, at first, and surprisingly convoluted. An alien robot named Guard (Kim Woo-bin) who has been sent to Earth with his nanite companion (voiced by Kim Dae-myung and occasionally played by Kim Woo-bin) travels back to the past to hunt down one of the prisoners who his race of creators has been imprisoning inside human bodies. Confused yet? It gets even more baffling when the only link between eras seems to be the baby they accidentally abduct into the future in their time machine (an SUV) and raise as their daughter. Meanwhile (previously? Temporal mechanics and grammar don't mix), in the past there's a hunt for a magical blade connected to a woman only known as the Girl Who Shoots Thunder (Kim Tae-ri).

So on one side there's a period mystical action-comedy influenced by Chinese Wuxia films and Korean muhyeop literature, with epic vistas, goofy comedy, and wire fu. On the other is a very contemporary, CG-heavy alien invasion flick, and even that is subdivided into a fun, if mawkish, kid-friendly romp and a surprisingly dark body horror. The latter reaches its peak in a big sequence in which an alien prison vehicle – basically a giant crystalline pistachio – throws out dozens of metallic tentacles that inject the alien convicts into their unwilling but oblivious Terran hosts.

But how does this mesh with the story of an inept Taoist monk (Ryu Jun-yeol) with sword problems, or the pair of grifting gurus (Yum Jung-ah and Jo Woo-jin), or the man in the modern suit wandering around a medieval village? Unfortunately, quite awkwardly.

The original Korean release title of Alien + Human Part 1 indicates director Choi Dong-hoon's intention to revisit these two intersecting storylines, and also shows why Alienoid stops rather than ends (although it's unclear how this opening chapter's poor box office performance in Korea may leave that cliffhanger hanging). It's just so many components that they often feel underserved, and it's tough not to compare Alienoid to a film like Shaolin Soccer, where a stuffed cast of wild characters is better served by a single location and a compact run time. Alienoid is so big in its ambition that it rarely coheres, and sequences in each time period go on for so long that the other era, and all its characters, fall away. But the characters are overwhelmingly entertaining, most especially Jo and Yum as the hapless monster hunters who are promised much bigger things if Part 2 ever happens. Equally, Kim Woo-bin is clearly having a blast as the stiff Guard and the chirpy, flamboyant Thunder, with their wildly varying parenting skills. Here's hoping that Part 2 is given a chance to balance out all their stories.