Zhandi: Yìzhong haojie

Of course I had never heard about this 2022 Chinese sci-fi action movie titled "Zhandi: Yìzhong Haojie" (aka "Battlefield Fall of the World") prior to stumbling upon it here in 2024 by random chance. And of course I opted to sit down and watch it given the recent years flood of creature features that has been spewing forth from the Chinese cinema; some good, some not so good.

Writers Dada Huang and Zhaosheng Huang put together an entertaining enough script for the movie. It is mindless entertainment, where you just grab your snack, lean back and enjoy the humans vs. Aliens action on the screen. There is very little to think about in the movie, and it doesn't make much of any sense; especially when you see how the aliens effortlessly tore through platoons of soldiers, and yet we are to believe that three sole survivors are capable of overcoming the alien overlord invasion. Sure...

The narrative in the movie was dull and slow paced, so very, very slow paced. I ended up giving up on finish watching the movie about halfway through. By then I was just so bored with the lack of any real story progress, and the stale narrative, that I just didn't want to keep watching.

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, but the Chinese cast were nicely cast and put on good performances, whereas the non-Chinese cast put on mostly dubious and questionable performances, especially the platoon leader in the beginning of the movie.

Visually then "Zhandi: Yìzhong Haojie" was okay. The CGI effects are good, but of course not a match for the top of the line Hollywood productions. But for a Chinese movie such as this, then the effects were actually quite good.

My rating of director Zhaosheng Huang's 2022 movie "Zhandi: Yìzhong Haojie" lands on a four out of ten stars.