In the first five minutes of Escape from the 21st Century, a chimney collapses, three boys fall into a lake full of chemicals and the teenagers discover after a sneeze that this very reflex catapults them 20 years into the future. Welcome to biggest sci-fi frenzy of the year.
Escape from the 21st Century is a friendship story in a brightly coloured sci-fi setting
Escape from the 21st Century is colourful, loud and a feast for the senses. If you don’t like fast cuts, playful image elements and absurd characters, you’re in the wrong place here. On the other hand, if you like a Sci-fi ecstasy at the intersection of Everything Everywhere All at Once, Big and Scott Pilgrim against the world can indulge in boundless joy with this film.
The Chinese sci-fi actioners by Yang Li focus on three friends: the cool Chengyong, the funny Wang Zha and the slightly chubby Pao Pao. After the chemical accident mentioned above, they are amazed at their new gift, their consciousness with a sneeze from 1999 to 2019 into their adult bodies – and back again the same way.
However, their future is not what they would have expected as children: Chengyong now apparently works as a criminal for an organ trafficking ring, Wang Zha is an investigative journalist and the now well-built Pao Pao is working with Chengyong’s flame Yang Yi. With no memories of the 20-year gap, they must first learn to find their way.
The plot of Escape from the 21st Century is undoubtedly crazy. But it fits all the better with the rest of the film, which Sci-fi entertainment celebrated in the most creative way.
Escape from the 21st Century challenges your eyes and ears as a sci-fi actioner
Actually, everything that Escape from the 21st Century offers shouldn’t fit into a film. And yet it does. What’s more, this very relentless excess of characters, images and story is what makes the sci-fi work so extraordinary.
The picture format, for example, changes between the 90s look of 4:3 and an extreme widescreen in the future that even makes 70-millimeter westerns pale in comparison. The action scenes are sometimes accompanied by classical orchestral music and sometimes by pop songs like “Holding out for a Hero”. animated comic elements the action and thus mitigate possible peaks of violence, which the fast-paced coming-of-age (or rather: jumping) story does not need anyway.
This also fits the Meta-humor that makes every Deadpool pale: For example, when someone picks up a word from the subtitles and looks at it. Or when the three friends’ fight trainer describes her previous Rocky training sequence as a “completely useless montage” and then adds her own. And I haven’t even started to tell you about the dryly subtitled cat or the scientist literally steaming out of his head.
It is all the more surprising when Escape from the 21st Century ends
from the flash of his impressions a common thread which suddenly makes everything make sense and the final boss can still be defeated.
This escalating science fiction film knows how to use its means
Laughter and amazement is the sci-fi motto here: Sometimes the silliness of the film makes you giggle childishly, for example when the adult Pao Pao sees a golden light shining from his own pants as he looks at his new ideal figure for the first time. The next moment the film impresses again with astonishing, Fight sequences that alternate between times. In one of them, two characters attack each other in a restaurant in the future and, after inhaling some pepper, continue to fight as children in a classroom in the past.
The fact that the sci-fi film is not even set on Earth, but on the (very Earth-like) planet K near Kepler, is irrelevant. Because beneath the visual and narrative adventure, the story fortunately still retains a human coreWhen the three friends realize that growing up doesn’t solve all their problems and that, despite all the subplots of lost love and saving the world, their friendship remains the most important thing in their relationship, it’s heartwarming.
As colorful as the computer cables that Wang Zha uses to jump out of a skyscraper or the batik paint palette of the lake of chemicals that the three boys fall into at the beginning, the fusion of friendship and science fiction is just as much fun, taking us on a wild ride with a dandelion under our sneezing nose. Escape from the 21st Century is a colorful sci-fi escalation of time and spacewhich you simply have to give yourself over to – and you will be rewarded a thousand times over. Because a science fiction film like this doesn’t come along every day.
More from the Fantasy Filmfest:
How and where you can watch Escape from the 21st Century:
Escape from the 21st Century had its European premiere on September 11, 2024 at the Fantasy Filmfest in Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Hamburg. On September 24, it will be shown by the FFF in Frankfurt and Cologne.
A German release in cinemas, home cinema or stream
Escape from the 21st Century beyond that, not yet.