Hong Kong sci-fi actioner Warriors of Future was first announced way back in 2015, with a different title and different director. But after production delays, COVID delays, and post-production delays – VFX shots are very labor-intensive, just ask Marvel – Warriors finally debuted to big numbers at the Hong Kong box office, with Louis Koo, Sean Lau, and Carina Lau frontlining the cast. In the future, humanity’s already on the ropes with warfare, disease, and climate disasters. It’s only then that a predatory alien lifeform arrives…
WARRIORS OF FUTURE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: In the future, frequent outbreaks of war have only become more deadly with the invention of military robots. Climate disasters have wrought seemingly irreparable environmental damage. Famine is widespread, disease is rampant, and humanity has built protective domes over key cities called “Sky Nets.” Add to all of this the arrival of a meteor, which when it cracks open spreads a viral alien plant form called “Pandora” across the earth’s surface, and brave air combat team commander Johnson Cheng (Sean Lau) has a lot of ground to cover. When Colonel Tam (Carina Lau) arrives with orders from the top brass to attack the alien with a new kind of growth-retarding “gene bullet” – “If we can release P7N9 inside Pandora’s pistil, we can stop it from growing…” – Cheng gives Tyler (Louis Koo) orders to gather his team and gas up their aircraft. They’ve got an alien plant to kill.
It’s not nearly so simple, of course. The operation is plagued with danger and error from the start, and soon it seems clear to the ACU that someone is meddling with their equipment and safety. Tam is a hard ass, no doubt about it, but she does seem willing to let Cheng and Tyler work. What about quiet, scheming general Sean Li (Nick Cheung)? Or Pandora itself? Not only is the alien presence sentient, it has minions of its own in a jaw-snapping and many-clawed throng of monstrous insects that look like beetles crossed with big cats.
With the bombs Li and Tam want to drop as a last resort looming, and mil-spec military robots threatening their operational sector, Tyler, Cheng, bumbling private Connor (Wan Guopeng) and “Skunk” (Phillip Keung), a loose cannon ex-member of the ACU, must work against the increasingly bad odds to recover and deploy the gene bullets, save any errant human civilians still in the kill zone, and hopefully keep their own necks intact. It’s a deadly gambit. But if anyone can save the little people from a hungry plant-based alien and maybe the entire earth from further destruction, it’s these guys. Right?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2021 South Korean sci-fi film Space Sweepers, while also indebted to the MCU and also caught up in COVID release date weirdness, was nevertheless a riotously enjoyable visual spectacle. And Warriors of Future shares cast members Louis Koo and Carina Lau with Dynasty Warriors, the big-budget fantasy epic from 2021 based on the Japanese video game franchise.
Performance Worth Watching: Koo is resolute here as the super soldier Tyler, and Carina Lau adds a few dashes of graceful subtlety to her take on the buttoned-down Colonel Tam. But it’s Phillip Keung who steals the show as Yau, aka “Skunk,” the disgraced former air combat teamer whose unconventional skill set and outsized personality become integral to the suicide mission.
Memorable Dialogue: “Tell your friend I’m not here to rescue him. And not only did I do it, I also did it beautifully!” The constant sniping between former brothers in arms Skunk and Tyler stays steady through so many daring escapes and close shaves, it soon becomes clear that this is the two friends’ actual love language.
Sex and Skin: Nothing here.
Our Take: As viewers, the commoditization and Marvelization of sci-fi action has trained our brains on what to expect. Production design is one thing, and in Warriors of Future, the ACU’s “skyfish” owes a lot to the MCU’s Quinjet, even if in practice it more closely resembles a UH-60 Black Hawk chopper crossed with a V-22 Osprey. And while military robots were stomping through movies long before the rise of Marvel – with all of its future tech and bursting bugs, Warriors has a spiritual descendent in Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers – the mechanized suits that Tyler and his team wear in Warriors are on a direct line with Tony Stark’s ever-evolving Iron Man get-up, from the inside-helmet comm systems to arms with super strength and numerous onboard weapons systems.
In Warriors of Future, that brain training we’ve all been subjected to doesn’t stop at simple aesthetics. It’s inherent in fight sequence choreography, too, and the accompanying sound and editing packages, and in Warriors, whenever a mech-suited soldier is slammed into a busted-up car, or fires a gatling gun at an aggressive and advancing military robot, it’s with a sense of sound and vision that we’ve heard and seen before. Warriors of Future looks pretty slick and sounds plenty loud. But the film hangs its sci-fi action on how much of it there is, and not on much of anything else, whether in nuance or plotting. Beyond all of the crashing tech and admittedly impressive creature effects, we’re left with actors like Phillip Keung, Carina Lau, and Louis Koo to make what they can out of a threadbare script.
Our Call: STREAM IT for the strong visual sense of Warriors of Future, which certainly grabs a ton of inspiration from the MCU but isn’t afraid to be as big and loud of a sci-fi outing as it possibly can. But there’s some enjoyable character work here, too, especially from wildman Phillip Keung.
Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges