But the spectacle is excellent, the action is exciting, and the audacity of the whole thing is a lot of fun. Like the equivalent American sci-fi blockbusters it closely resembles - Armageddon leaps instantly to mind - The Wandering Earth features giggle-worthy science and a sprawling cast of thinly defined characters playing out their own personal crises atop the global catastrophe than links them all. Too bad Jupiter’s gravity well is right there. Then it gives them a solution straight out of ’50s sci-fi: Humanity decides to strap a ton of rockets onto Earth and fly it like a spaceship out of the solar system and toward another sun. TR Psychokinesisīilled as China’s first sci-fi blockbuster and built on a scale meant to fully justify that title, 2019’s The Wandering Earth presents its characters with a problem out of Snowpiercer - the Earth is freezing and everyone’s going to die. Darkly hilarious at times, depressingly grim at others, and endlessly surprising as the truth behind the strange facility gradually emerges, this clever, bloody metaphor movie is absolutely unique, and one of the best and strangest movies on Netflix. It’s a simple, stark metaphor for wealth inequality, but Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia complicates it with brutal rules and clever wrinkles, then with character choices, as the inmates start arguing about how to respond to the system, and each chooses their own path. Once a day, a magnificent banquet descends down the shaft on a floating platform - but the prisoners in the topmost cells eat everything they can, leaving a picked-over mess (or nothing at all) for those below them. In an eerie near-future, prisoners are kept in a facility consisting of bare concrete rooms, all connected by an open vertical shaft. It’s honestly shocking that Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s terrifying movie The Platform is his debut feature: It’s polished and confident in a way that suggests a lifetime of filmmaking, and it’s deeply weird in a way that suggests a director with the cachet to get any “one for me” movie below a certain price point funded. It is also bookended by some banger fight scenes, which is always a plus. Yeon’s animation background goes a long way to making this work, clearly aiding his ability to frame and integrate CG characters into the rest of JUNG_E’s environments. The movie thrives on its designs, with great creatures augmented by incredible sound effects like shifting gears and whirring machinery that bring the mechanical creatures to life. While not as consistently thrilling as some of his previous projects, JUNG_E is still very solid science fiction action fare. It’s a stirring performance from the late Kang Soo-yeon, who died before the release of the movie, one that requires her to interview versions of her mother before shutting them down for good. Instead of a sprawling war movie, Yeon instead decides to focus on a much smaller story, much to JUNG_E’s benefit: one of a lonely scientist tasked with cloning the perfect soldier from the brain of her comatose mother. Two factions have emerged from these space colonies, and have been warring for decades. In JUNG_E, most humans have been sent fleeing to space after the ravages of climate change. His latest movie, JUNG_E, harkens back to even more classic science fiction touchstones: artificial intelligence, cloning, robots, and the commodification of people and bodies (with a side of the more modern “humans as data products”). Yeon Sang-ho is consistently one of the most interesting sci-fi filmmakers working today, touching on different branches of the genre, like apocalyptic fiction ( Train to Busan, Hellbound) and superhero fiction ( Psychokinesis). Violent and brazen with full-bodied alien action (whatever the opposite of Alien’s hide-the-creatures-in-the-shadows scariness is, this is it), Beyond Skyline orchestrates mayhem like the best direct-to-DVD schlockfests, hands Grillo the conductor baton, then gives The Raid’s Iko Uwais just enough extraterrestrial-smashing solos to qualify as a romp. B-movie bruiser Frank Grillo ( Captain America: The Winter Soldier) stars in the playfully vicious continuation Beyond Skyline, which finds his LAPD detective rescuing his son from abduction, then rescuing his son from inside the hull of a brain-extracting vessel, then rescuing a hybrid alien-human baby from a battalion of slobbering aliens, then helping a band of Laotian freedom fighters rescue humanity from the final wave of the invasion. and yet, here we are, ecstatically recommending it. So no one would fault you for overlooking the unsolicited sequel. 2010’s Skyline was nothing to phone home about, an alien-invasion epic with the heart of a DIY special effects reel.
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