4 Stars (out of 4)

Rent/buy Alienoid on Amazon
Watch Alienoid 2 on Amazon Prime
Watch Alienoid on Hulu
Watch Alienoid 2 on Hulu

I’m venturing out of Bollywood for this review because I love the Alienoid movies so much. I’m combining Alienoid and Alienoid 2 in to a single review, because they tell one complete story and were filmed together–kind of like Gangs of Wasseypur 1 & 2.

Writer-director Choi Dong-hoon’s duology Alienoid and Alienoid 2: The Return to the Future defies genre, because the films contain elements of nearly every genre. Calling them historical-action-fantasy-thriller-sci-fi-martial-arts-comedy-time-travel-family-dramas comes pretty close. Choi pulls off his audacious project with incredible finesse.

In the version of reality that Choi presents in the films, Earth serves as a jail for prisoners from an alien civilization. The aliens implant their prisoners into the brains of humans who live their lives unaware of their cranial stowaways. When the humans die, so do the prisoners, who can’t survive more than five minutes in Earth’s atmosphere.

Occasional breakouts happen — resulting in the violent alien controlling its human and rampaging outside its human cage (in five-minute bursts) — so a Guard (Kim Woo-bin) stays on Earth to recapture escapees and minimize casualties and witnesses. Prisoners are sequestered in different time periods, so Guard uses his shape-changing computer/vehicle/doppelgänger sidekick Thunder (also Kim, trust me, it makes sense) to travel wherever and whenever he’s needed.

The story begins in a Korean village in 1380. Guard and Thunder battle and capture an escaped prisoner whose human host dies in the melee, leaving behind an infant daughter. They bring the baby with them to the present — Seoul, 2012 — and raise her, naming her Lee Ahn.

Ten years later — Seoul, 2022 — and perceptive 10-year-old Lee Ahn (Choi Yoo-ri) suspects that her “Dad,” Guard, isn’t human and that his car might be sentient. Her curiosity puts her in danger when the deadly alien prisoner The Controller is brought to Earth, and his lackeys attempt to free him. After a devastating attack on the city, Guard and Thunder grab Lee Ahn and travel back to 1391 to trap The Controller in the past. But things don’t go as planned.

The story cuts between scenes in contemporary Seoul and a Korean town circa 1400, where the main character is a magician named Mureuk (Ryu Jun-yeol). There’s a big bounty for something called The Divine Knife, and Mureuk wants to find it and cash in. But men far more dangerous than Mureuk are also looking for the knife, as is a beautiful thief (played by Kim Tae-ri). Soon enough, Mureuk is in over his head.

With all the aliens, robots, and spaceships, you’d think director Choi would content himself to stay in the realm of science fiction. But magic is very real in the world of Alienoid, and the characters who wield it are some of the best, funniest characters in the movies. Mureuk himself is hilarious thanks to Ryu’s deft physical comedy. Mureuk’s two sidekicks — Left Paw (Lee Si-hoon) and Right Paw (Shin Jung-geun) — are a pair of cats who live in his magical fan and can turn into humans (trust me, it makes sense).

Then there are the Sorcerers of the Twin Peaks, Heug-sol (Yum Jung-ah) and Cheong-woon (Jo Woo-jin), the film’s most reliable comic relief. Like Mureuk, their laughs typically come from the unintended consequences of their own spells. While they are great in the first movie, they’re complete scene-stealers in the second.

Lee Hanee also deserves praise for playing the flirtatious single aunt of one of Ean’s school friends.

The first film does the heavy lifting from a plot standpoint, which makes sense with a story this dense. The second movie provides some different viewpoints on events from the first and introduces an important new character: a blind swordsman played by Jin Seon-kyu, who also wants the Divine Blade.

Both films successfully blend comedy, character growth, and action to maintain story momentum. There isn’t a dull moment in either Alienoid movie. Action sequences range from comical hand-to-hand combat to large-scale scenes of destruction that feel more tangible and impactful than much of the city-wide carnage in recent Hollywood superhero films.

Alienoid 1 & 2 are totally immersive, but they’re also something to marvel at from a meta perspective. As giddy as I was while watching, it was hard not to wonder at how Choi manages to make all the disparate elements of the story work together so seamlessly. But the mechanics of how he does it ultimately don’t matter, when the movies are so darn much fun.

Links

• Alienoid at Wikipedia
• Alienoid at IMDb
• Alienoid 2: The Return to the Future at Wikipedia
• Alienoid 2: The Return to the Future at IMDb
• My review of Gangs of Wasseypur Parts 1 & 2

[Disclaimer: my Amazon links include an affiliate tag, and I may earn a commission on purchases made via those links. Thanks for helping to support this website!]