A year and a half ago, South Korean director-screenwriter Choi Dong-hoon/최동훈 (THE THIEVES) released the most ambitious film of his career. ALIENOID cost US$20 million and it was one of that country’s most expensive films to date. It bombed at the box office though, taking in just US$12 million worldwide. Normally the studios would close their books on a money-loser and move on but Choi had other plans. ALIENOID was just the first part of a two-part, time-travelling fantasy-adventure. Now, ALIENOID: RETURN TO THE FUTURE (which I’ll refer to as ALIENOID 2 for simplicity) has been released and it’s everything that ALIENOID was. One could even say that it’s everything in two different centuries in South Korea all at once.

In the first part of the series, we learned that a race of aliens has been using Earth as its prison for centuries. Every so often, a new shipment of prisoners arrives and they get injected into the brains of unsuspecting humans. When the humans die, so do the prisoners. An alien known as Guard (Kim Woo-bin/김우빈) is in charge on ensuring that the prisoners don’t escape from their human hosts, which they apparently do from time to time. When that happens, Guard and his robotic sidekick Thunder (voiced by Kim Dae-myung/김대명) travel through space and time to put them back inside.

After the alien prisoner known as the Controller escapes, he releases a poisonous red gas known as “haava” on the citizens of Seoul, killing thousands of them. Customs officer Min Gaelin (Lee Ha-nee/이하늬) witnesses this and she realises that she needs to stop the Controller from killing all of humanity.

Meanwhile, Guard’s adopted daughter, Ean (Kim Tae-ri/김태리), has become trapped in the 14^th century. She needs to find the Divine Blade that will open a door through time and allow her to return to the present day but many other people want to get their hands on the blade too, including clumsy but loveable Taoist shaman Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol/류준열), sorcerers Madam Black (Yum Jung-ah/염정아) and Mr. Blue (Jo Woo-jin/조우진), the warrior Nong-pa (Jin Seon-kyu/진선규) and the sinister Jajang (Kim Eui-sung/김의성).

I can pretty much quote from my review of ALIENOID as the same problems with the first installment are evident in the second. Although ALIENOID 2 is slightly more interesting than its predecessor, there are still far too many characters for audiences to follow. At least ALIENOID 2 answers many questions about the characters that went unanswered in the first installment but it also introduces a few new plot holes and one of them, concerning Muruk, is quite a large one. As I wrote back in 2022, Choi is obviously trying to emulate what MARVEL did with AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR and AVENGERS: ENDGAME and in this film one of the characters even dissolves à la “the Snap”. I also wrote in 2022 that there are obvious comparisons to BACK TO THE FUTURE. I didn’t know at the time that this film would be called RETURN TO THE FUTURE. At least Choi had the good sense to end this film on the right scene rather than dragging it any longer than it already was. Even so, ALIENOID 2 is still a joyless slog.

It’s still early days (the film was released in South Korea two weeks ago) and ALIENOID 2 may yet end up in the black but only because Choi front-loaded many of his production costs. Taking the two films together and the profit picture doesn’t look good at all.

ALIENOID: RETURN TO THE FUTURE opens here in Hong Kong tomorrow (January 25^th). If you’ve already seen the first part of this series, then you may want to see this one too if only to find out what happens to Ean and Muruk. If you haven’t seen ALIENOID though, don’t bother starting now.

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