Warriors of Future

In the near future the world has been made unliveable by environmental collapse. A meteorite falls on Hong Kong and the alien plant inside it spreads fast; it cleans the air and swallows the city. The army wants the root destroyed, while a group of soldiers tries to alter it and put it to use. The subject is not science fiction but who will control the solution. The real conflict is not with the plant but between two military factions who cannot agree on the route to survival, and the war grows out of that. The form is built entirely on visual effects. Armoured suits, drones and vast plant structures appear in nearly every scene. The narrative is thin and the characters functional; the whole claim of the film is in the image. The production was made at an exceptional scale for Hong Kong cinema. The budget was close to four hundred and fifty million Hong Kong dollars, unprecedented there. Louis Koo took a credit as principal producer through his own company for the first time. The director, Ng Yuen-Fai, spent years in visual effects and this is his first film. It became the highest-grossing Chinese-language film of all time in Hong Kong. Lau Ching-Wan and Carina Lau are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like large-scale science fiction action. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a screenplay; the narrative is weak and the dialogue plainly functional.