Escape from the 21st Century review: A stylish, bold sci-fi romp

Ever since hearing about the totally bonkers Chinese sci-fi movie Escape from the 21st Century late last year, I’ve been eagerly waiting for it to come out stateside. I heard great things from friends who saw it at festivals after it premiered in China last summer, and every image and clip I saw out of the movie oozed with life and personality.

My wait was worth it. Escape from the 21st Century is an unforgettable moviegoing experience – it’s confident, playful, and visually stunning despite working on a limited budget. You can see it for yourself next week, when the movie shows in select US theaters for one day only on June 9.

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In 1999, three rambunctious teens jump into a body of water tainted with chemicals. Now, when they sneeze, they’re transported into the bodies of their adult selves 20 years in the future and vice versa: A sneeze in 2019 returns them to their teenage bodies in 1999. They find a violent and chaotic dystopian future, but the teens are mostly still concerned with their teen problems, even in 2019 – childhood crushes, whether their future self is sufficiently cool and/or jacked. While a lot of these elements are extraordinarily silly, the premise stealthily allows for a coming-of-age story about what’s lost in the act of growing up and the turmoil of knowingly heading into a dangerous future. This is especially effective because this isn’t a normal time travel narrative – circumstances don’t change, but people do. (For example, the teens try to win the lottery with their knowledge, but the winning numbers change to match the person who is supposed to win).

Director Li Yang pulls directly from a lot of varied inspirations: Terry Gilliam’s sci-fi worlds, The Goonies-style coming-of-age narratives, the endless gags of Monty Python and Looney Tunes, and plenty of stylistic notes from video games and anime. With those varied inspirations and the use of animation to add punctuation to fight scenes and objects in the world, Escape from the 21st Century reminded me of Hundreds of Beavers, one of my favorite movies of the decade and another low-budget movie that succeeds due to its confidence in its vision.

The movie’s humor is offbeat, with a playful tone and a willingness to get weird, but there’s an internal logic and comedic rhythm that helps prevent it from feeling like an endless stream of “we’re soOoOo random” gags. Some examples: In the future, there’s a doctor who puts his brain into a new body whenever he gets old, and because of the procedure, his head is always emitting smoke. At one point, a character picks up a word in the subtitles and shows it to the other people in the scene. At another, a character explains how they’re going to accomplish something by saying “It’s okay, time for special effects.” And on multiple occasions, a character will suddenly be holding a French horn for a punchline.

While it’s an appealing mix of visual humor and jokes in the dialogue, not all of it works. Notably, there is one particularly cruel fat joke that sours the otherwise stellar third act – both because the joke is mean without being particularly funny (there was a funnier joke on the table that was passed up in favor of the easier one), and because it’s one of the only cases of poorly deployed VFX in the whole movie.

But even with that crucial caveat, Escape from the 21st Century is so ambitious and bold that, by the end, the elements that didn’t quite work for me were overshadowed by all that did. I’m not sure where director Yang got this confidence so early in his career, but it’s remarkable to see a movie so completely unafraid and unrestrained, doing literally anything it wants at any time, visually and narratively. Unrelenting in its creativity and daring, Escape from the 21st Century uses every tool available to present a truly maximalist sci-fi romp that will undoubtedly be one of the most memorable new movies of the year.

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