Film Brain reviews an absolutely bonkers Chinese film where teens travel in time through sneezing, that's like Everything Everywhere All at Once, Stephen Chow, and Edgar Wright in a dazzling, if frantic, mashup.
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00:00The Chinese sci-fi action comedy Escape from the 21st Century is so absolutely bonkers,
00:04you'll think I'm making it up, but trust me, this is a real film.
00:08On the Earth-like planet K, three teenagers in 1999 jump into a lake filled with chemicals
00:14and discover they have the power to jump back and forth into their bodies 20 years later by sneezing.
00:19There they discover a dark future for themselves which threatens to tear their friendship apart,
00:24but they'll have to fight together if they want to save both their past and the future.
00:29To try and describe it in a way which would make sense, this is like if you stuck Stephen Chow,
00:34Edgar Wright, and Everything Everywhere all at once in a blender, just a candy-coloured adrenaline hit
00:40that cycles through so many different styles and aspect ratios so fast it almost makes your head spin.
00:46It's like mainlining pop culture, particularly anime and video games,
00:50especially with the animated superpowers and the fight sequences,
00:53and the references to Red Alert and Street Fighter 2.
00:56This starts out frantic and dares you to keep up.
00:59Just simply forget about the fact that it's set on planet K.
01:02That's simply to avoid Chinese censorship issues.
01:05The sheer inventiveness of what's on screen is almost off the scale.
01:08It's ludicrously ambitious and it keeps throwing more eye-popping silliness at you,
01:12even if sometimes the effects work struggles to keep up with the scale.
01:16This is also jam-packed with visual gags, some which made me laugh my head off,
01:20and while it is at times almost overwhelming, the film is certainly never boring.
01:25It's absolutely as mad as a box of frogs,
01:27or in this case the vibrantly psychotropic toes that are a key plot point.
01:32What it perhaps lacks is the earnest optimism of Everything Everywhere's Waymond,
01:36but at the heart of this is the fear of what if the future gets worse?
01:40What if the grown-up world sucks?
01:42The bright, nostalgic hues of the 1999 scenes contrast sharply with the dark,
01:47almost cyberpunk 2019 scenes in pencil-thin widescreen,
01:51and those sharp changes in tone can be jarring
01:53when the film speedruns through them in a way that teeters on the edge of coherence.
01:58But even in an uncertain future, there's always hope for something better.
02:02An escape from the 21st century is a lot of chaotic fun.