00:00Lewis Koo will have to save history when invaders from the future go back to the past in this Hong Kong sci-fi actioner.
00:07Time-traveller Koo has chosen to stay in the past with his family,
00:10partly because Raymond Lam, who Koo helped mentor to the throne, has become the tyrannical Qin Emperor.
00:16When the Time Machine's inventor, Michael Mu, imprisoned for 20 years when Koo did not return,
00:21travels back to take the Emperor's place, Koo and Lam are forced into an uneasy alliance to stop him.
00:26This is actually a continuation of the hugely popular television series A Step Into The Past,
00:31which ran for 40 episodes in 2001, with most of the cast returning,
00:36so you can imagine it's a pretty odd viewing experience for Western audiences who have never even heard of it.
00:41Luckily, the film starts with a recap and shows footage from the series throughout,
00:45so you can quickly pick up the gist, but it's largely assuming that the target audience are already very familiar with the characters.
00:51Thankfully, the main emotional hook between Koo and Lam is strong enough to easily anchor the film,
00:56with a strange father-son dynamic and respect between them at times,
01:00but the Emperor often leads with brutal force and Koo resents the man he's become.
01:05That would certainly be enriched if you know the show,
01:08but many of the supporting characters are largely inexplicable if you're not,
01:12with lots of people popping in and out with very little introduction, sometimes to their emotional deaths.
01:17I did start to wonder if those moments would play better if I had more of a clue than their five minutes of screen time here,
01:22or whether if I was a fan I'd be ticked off that I'd been waiting 20 years for a borderline cameo appearance.
01:28Back to the Past was apparently a bit of a running joke in Hong Kong because of its notoriously long production history,
01:34as this filmed all the way back in 2019 and spent five years in post-production.
01:39I think if it came out any later, its own release would be considered a feat of time travel.
01:43The finished film sometimes shows scars of this, with choppy editing and some oddly integrated flashbacks
01:48to presumably clarify character motivations.
01:52I may not have fully understood it, but I was entertained in a brainless action way,
01:55as it's fun to see terracotta warriors going up against futuristic cigar-chomping baddies with machine guns
02:00who can produce motorbikes and hoverboards out of their pockets, even with some pretty ropey CGI.
02:05But despite Sam Oh Hung as action director, the fight scenes are shot disappointingly close and tight,
02:10totally obscuring his choreography.
02:13Back to the Past also does one thing I've never seen before.
02:16It finishes and then says,
02:18Please wait for the alternate ending, which plays the mid-credits scene.
02:22Maybe this accounts for its long delays, as this fan service ending is very silly,
02:27but was presumably too expensive to waste.
02:29But it just goes to show that this film is mostly for fans of the series, not newcomers like this bozo.
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