Tang Zhijun, an editor of a science fiction magazine, attempts to find signs of an alien civilisation. When a strange young man claims to have received instructions from aliens, Tang and his team follow him in search of extraterrestrial creatures.

Low-key SciFi comedy from China. Hadn’t heard of it before tonight. About halfway through so far. Bit of a slog at first but it’s getting more interesting as the story progresses.

  • ZagorathEnglish
    2·
    5 months ago

    Interesting. I love modern twists on classic stories. Out of interest, how familiar are you with the story of Journey to the West, and what sort of interesting decisions did this make in the process of adapting it to scifi?

    • maniacalmanicmaniaOPEnglish
      4·
      5 months ago

      Only familiar in that I grew up watching the Japanese TV show Monkey and have seen a few other Journey adaptations since then (seems to be a new one every year or so). After watching this movie I feel like I need to read the book for the first time.

      The sci-fi in this is really low-key, not so much wizz bang/hi-tech as humanistic Carl Sagany sci-fi.

      It’s shot in a mockumentary style and the characters are all a bit sad. I’m also not sure if the movie is punching down on all of them at the same time. Like I said in another comment perhaps I missed a lot of local humour and context.

      I make it sound worse then it is. We enjoyed it.

      Edit: it was also good to see ‘Subtitles by SBS’ in the credits again (like the old days before advertising). I feel like we’ve watched a lot of badly subbed movies on SBS the last few years and I was wondering if SBS had cut that department.

    • maniacalmanicmaniaOPEnglish
      1·
      5 months ago

      Yeah good. I was a bit fidgety last night and didn’t give it my undivided attention in the second half (maybe because of the anti-Chinese comment someone posted here).

      I think I missed a bit of context or maybe some things were lost in translation. Kind of like how you can really enjoy Shin Godzilla but you just know that the political satire just doesn’t translate through subtitles and the such.