ALIENOID – Review

ALIENOID is a fairly light-hearted Korean fantasy about an alien race using Earth to house its evil-doers. The movie is a mixed blessing. The CGI effects are superb but the plot may strike many, myself included, as being far more complicated than needed.

In the 1300s, aliens unwilling to kill or confine their criminals in situ, instead send them to Korea where they plant them in unwitting humans’ brains, where they are trapped until they die along with their host. A couple of versatile, sentient robots, capable of morphing into many forms, are stationed there to recapture any criminals who manage to escape and try jumping into another body. That gives us a second epoch of action – the present, along with a child they rescued from the past and raised for a decade in our future. Actually, make that three time-frames, since we also get to bounce around with a bunch of their flashbacks.

But wait. There’s more. We have sorcerers in the past vying over an object they don’t understand that contains all sorts of powers, making it a Holy Grail for humans and The Others. A number of characters provide comic relief, while others tear through the Koreas of then and now with no regard for casualties or devastation. Many of the scenes play out as live-action Manga, full of rapid-fire, colorful and often large-scale mayhem on top of some fanciful martial arts encounters.

Tired yet? Well, the capper is that this 144-minute opus is only Part One. The concluding installment is due for release in 2023. Those who groove on action-packed video games will probably follow the time switches, flashbacks and logical underpinnings of what the characters are able to do more easily than others. Since I’m not of that demographic, joystick jockeys should factor that into the weight they give this analysis. Their mileage will almost certainly vary.

ALIENOID, in Korean with English subtitles, opens in select theaters Friday, Aug. 26.

RATING: 2 out of 4 stars