Escape from the 21st Century (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts | Sneeze to the future - video Dailymotion

Film Brain

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.

Escape from the 21st Century (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts | Sneeze to the future

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