South Korea. 2022.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Dong Hoon-choi, Producer – Sung-min Kim, Photography – Tae-kyung Kim, Music – Young-gyu Jang, Production Design – Lee Ha-jun. Production Company – Caper Film.
Cast
Ryu Jun-yeol (Mureuk), Kim Woo-bin (Guard), Kim Tae-ri (Lee Ahn), Choi Yu-ri (Young Lee Ahn), Yum Jung-ah (Heung-seol), Jo Woo-jin (Cheong-woon), Shin Jung-geun (Right King), Lee Si-hoon (Left King), So Ji-sub (Moon Do-seok), Kim Eui-sung (Ja-jang), Lee Hanee (Min Gae-in), Kim Dae-myung (Voice of Thunder)
Plot
Aliens have been secretly using Earth as a prison, confining the alien Paro inside human bodies. Guard and Thunder are two robots that have been left to police the operation. The two of them pursue one escaped prisoner back through time to the year 1380 in the midst of Korea’s Goryeo Dynasty. They recapture the alien but at the cost of killing the woman whose body it is inhabiting. This leaves her child Lee Ahn parentless, which will in effect sentence her to death. Thunder persuades Guard that the best thing to do is take Lee Ahn with them. In 2022, Lee Ahn goes to school with Guard in its human form acting as her parent while they live in an abandoned factory. She has distant memories of the two robots and eavesdrops on Guard and Thunder’s conversations to work out that Thunder is disguised as the SUV. Guard and Thunder learn that the Paro are coming to Earth to free their leader The Controller. Meanwhile, back in 1380, the swordsman Mureuk seeks to find the Divine Knife that is also sought by the masked Ja-gang and assorted others.
Alienoid was the sixth film for South Korean director Dong Hoon-choi, who has elsewhere specialised in the Korean gangster and action film with the likes of The Big Swindle (2004), The War of Flower (2006), The Thieves (2012) and Assassination (2015), as well as work directing videogames. He had made one other genre film with Woochi: The Demon Slayer (2009), which has a similar premise to Alienoid in which warring 16th century magicians are transported into the present day.
Alienoid has to be one of the most confusing films I have ever seen in recent memory. It starts out in the year 1380 as an SUV suddenly interrupts a battle as a robot and a drone that looks like a flying iMac go into action. They return to the present taking the young girl (Choi Yu-ri) with them. In the present, she attends school while one of the robots disguised in human form acts as her father and they live in an abandoned factory with the father robot keeping the existence of the drone/talking SUV from her as she seeks to find out the truth.
The action flips and flops between eras and another whole plotline set in 1380 where a flying swordsman thief is joined by two cats that transform into people as they fight various parties, including two magicians, for an artefact. Somewhere in the 14th Century mix is a newlywed bride who has a modern handgun.
The profusion of elements left me confused as to what was going on for at least two-thirds of the film. Eventually the plot threaded together but I have a suspicion that with a 142 minute runtime most people would have abandoned Alienoid well before then. Even then some of the elements left me confused at the end – why was the thief Meurek accompanied by two cats that can transform into humans? Who was the masked bad guy and the two magicians?
That said, Alienoid comes to life when Dong Hoon-choi gets to the effects and action scenes. There is a great sequence in mid film with two robots beating each other up in an elevator that escalates to a scene with two alien ships pursuing each other through the streets, which reaches a scale of reasonable mass destruction. It might not give Michael Bay sleepless nights but Dong pulls off some decent action on a lesser budget. There is also a highly amusing sequence where Ryu Jun-yeol does a Mission: Impossible-styled winch down on a pulley as the two mages are left paralysed, struggling to get to the antidote at the same time as he ends up fighting a bunch of others all around them.
The saga was completed in Alienoid: Return to the Future (2024), which makes more sense of the various dangling and unexplained plot elements.
Trailer here