Comparisons to Everything Everywhere All at Once seem inevitable in the early buzz on Yang Li’s Escape from the 21st Century. The TIFF program guide cites it, along with Scott Pilgrim, Tsui Hark, and Stephen Chow. None of those seem exactly right though, and Everything Everywhere least of all. Notably, Escape lacks that Oscar-winner’s star power: none of its performers are as exceptional as Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan. But while it may boast a bevy of great actors, Everything Everywhere doesn’t have a tenth of the visual imagination Yang brings to Escape. More than any of those other analogues from Hollywood or Hong Kong, Escape reminds of contemporary Japanese science fiction films like Junta Yamaguchi’s time travel brain-twisters (River and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes) and, most especially, Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno’s Shin Kamen Rider. It’s a bold mix of ideas and action, never afraid to take a tragic turn. It’s much more committed to the darkness of its world than would be acceptable in an Oscar movie, and its otherwise familiar existential solutions are more earned because of it.
One of the more interesting things about Escape is that its world is not our own. It’s set, a narrator tells us, in the years 1999 and 2019 on the distant Planet K, which are times and places very much like our Earth China, except they allow the movie to maintain plausible deniability for the sake of our Mainland Chinese censorship board. Three teen boys are doing teen boy things (climbing towers, getting in fights) when they fall into some toxic waste and learn that whenever they sneeze, their consciousness jumps 20 years into the future. The 2019 world is a depressing place — not at all like Xi Jinping’s China! — and the three boys become deeply depressed at the ways their lives have turned out. One is a hired killer for a medical company that illegally traffics organs; another is a photojournalist hanging around a badass writer who has a terrible boyfriend; and the third, a hefty nerd in the past, has grown handsome and muscled, and is dating the girl who had been the love of his friend’s life (the guilt here is colored too by the fact that she’s depressed and drifting away in addiction).
The boys try various schemes to improve the past, but nothing seems to work. The evil corporations that rule 2019 only grow more powerful, and the women in their lives fall ever more apart. The journalists are being hunted by the assassin’s partner, a nigh-unstoppable killing machine, and the bad guys have figured out a way to take advantage of the kids’ time-leaping abilities, which will result in the end of civilization as we know it. The apocalypse is nigh — but then again, it always is. Everybody dies sometime.
Yang packs all this with quick cuts and bright colors (toxic waste swirling in the water like a lava lamp, bright red and orange sunsets), shifts to anime-style animation (making explicit the film’s debt to Japanese sci-fi, while also recalling Hong Kong films like Gallants and Tai Chi Zero), terrific action sequences, and bold soundtrack choices (perhaps the best use of Bonnie Tyler in a Chinese-language film?). It’s dizzying in all the good ways you’d expect from this kind of thing, while remaining deeply pessimistic about China’s (errr, “Planet K’s”) future and its recent past. The kids know things are bad and getting worse. Everything Everywhere gives them platitudes about family and forgiveness. Yang Li knows there’s no real way to escape the 21st century. Best to just kick its ass or die trying.
Published as part if TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 2.
