My quick rating - 6,2/10. Apparently it was time for Hong Kong to get into the big budget sci-fi business and after years of great action flix, I am looking forward to seeing what they have to offer. Nice to see a little Starship Troopers inspired action sprinkled into this one. And we get some Crysis inspired exosuits that grant enhanced abilities along with the scenes that look to be right out of the PC game I enjoyed years ago. Instead of making a 5 hour movie, they crammed in a ton of pre-story in the beginning to setup the world that the movie takes place in. I found this adequate BUT the story they came up with was pretty interesting and could be some decent material for a flick on its own (possible prequel?) Anyways, quickly, a meteorite plows into Earth bringing creatures to destroy the humans, but also has the ability to save the atmosphere ravaged world. So a team of soldiers take on the task of engaging the aliens to basically bomb the base of the invaders with something to trigger the chemical reaction to save the planet. The science involved in this seemed ridiculous to me so I wouldn't much worry about it for that. This is here as an action/scifi vehicle start to finish. Yuen Fai Ng directs his first feature film after doing visual effects on numerous excellent films, so it makes sense that many of the scenes in this flick look phenomenal. The CGI is definitely on par with a Hollywood blockbuster which I can tell was the plan here. The action is virtually non-stop and is edited together very well to really keep it flowing through long scenes with various futuristic weapons and robots being utilized all at once. I just felt that there was so much that went into the story that is ignored and then so much more that is just completely out of the realm of believable that I had to just sigh a couple times. The first review on IMDB said "No real story" which is asinine since that was the problem, the movie had entirely too much story most of which you are just force fed into knowing it happened and just move straight into the action. That is the balance issue since it would've made a great trilogy or some 6 hour marathon if they took the time to develop all the ideas that they had. But still it was a great sight to see just for the thrills. The robots looked slick in hand to hand fights that were well choregraphed especially since they were done so on a PC. For any fan of these types of flicks just have to know what you are in for and bring the popcorn. I personally watched it dubbed and I really don't think that dub vs subtitles for this flick is really going to make much of a difference.
Currently streaming on Netflix
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