Batalla por la Tierra

An odd movie. Well over 95 percent, including the dramatic speeches, are in Chinese. Oddly enough, there are brief moments when the characters speak English. This theme continues. In a series of scenes in a cave system, there are signs and other English writing, but a book discovered by one of the characters is in Chinese.

There was a fully dressed guy floating in a sort of large oval tank. There is nothing to hint at his contribution to the story. There's no hint if he's a specimen, a hostage, or somehow connected to the aliens. Later, the tank is destroyed, but there's no hint of what happened to the guy in the tank.

There are easily ten thousand bullets fired at creatures that are clearly bulletproof, after the first ten rounds.

The special effects are really the only reason to watch this movie once. ( no offence to any Chinese viewers )

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.

I was looking forward to this one, since I really enjoyed the (much higher budget) Warriors of Future, another last stand of humanity against aliens picture.

To be fair, that film's budget for the buffet table was probably more than this entire production's combined, so I won't judge it on the same level.

Our story is here is pretty simple. Alien threat has landed. Humans are pretty screwed.

It all starts with humanity's last stand, that doesn't go very well at all. Literally everyone gets killed. All humanity's weapons do nothing and they tear through the troops like tissue paper.

Our hero jumps into a Hummer and speeds off, which is why he survives. To be fair to him, he's not a trained soldier, just a new recruit thrown into the thick of it. And the film deals with his redemption arc and one last ditch attempt to take out the alien scum.

It's a decent premise for a B movie. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes apparent that time and budget were working against the team behind this, as the SFX are not great. They look very early-2000s, and even if the alien design is pretty cool, it can't cover the dated visuals and oddly-lifeless explosions, which are all CG.

Even the gunshots are CG, which is fine most times, except here it is really, painfully obvious, as the extras didn't get any training in weapon handling, so they kind of just wave them about in the air and judder them a bit.

I got used to it after a while. But sadly there's nothing much else that keeps you going.

The script is pretty basic and cliche-ridden, and doesn't do much to keep you engaged. All the english-speaking actors do okay, but you can see them struggling with what is obviously their second language.

The Chinese actors do very well, giving really committed performances. If the script had been better they'd have had more of a chance. As it is, they're worth watching for what they could do next, and I hope they get more opportunities.

The same can be said of the direction, which is pretty great. Some grand sweeping shots and good staging. It's way above what you'd get in a low-budget American movie like this, which will point a camera vaguely in the direction of the actors and that will be it. Here the camera moves during the action, we get good tracking shots, and some gorgeously stages and lit vistas.

But the effects don't get any better, sadly. Which I could have lived with, if the script had been fleshed out.

It is a darn shame, really, cause you can tell everyone that worked on this worked really hard to make a decent movie. They did the best they could with what they had, and tried their darndest.

Time and budget worked against them. And that's really sad.

All the peoples who work on this movie have my respect concerning the special effects. It is a very hard work, a team effort to create something very clean.

BUT and holy cow, it is a big one :

What the hell the producers do ?

In the coming lines i will explain THE ABSOLUTE rules to follow to do a movie even with a poor budget, and it will look like pro.

Any movies who follow these rules will work.

1 - 25 or 24 fps NEVER EVER do a 60 fps frame rate.

It is for video game and even video games for 3d cgi use 24 fps.

60 fps looks plastic.

2 - always exaggerate. Motion blur and moves.

3 - use focal and blurts into explosions - blur into movement

4 - if 1 effect looks cheep into the middle of 1000 who looks great, redo the effects or everything will be lost.

5 - musics and bgm need to follow action, need to be 50% of the action, do not put a music over the top it will not work, or do it for less 2 minutes to a special shot or scene. If the bgm are bad the movie is bad. If the OST are bad the movie is bad.

6 - stupid characters, cliché acting, over reaction and sunglasses by night are for comedies not for serious apocalyptic movies.

And you know what ?

Producers DO NOT FOLLOW ANY OF THESE RULES at ALL !

They do the exact opposite.

And this is why a movie who cost millions and have a not so bad story, looks like a end of studies' project.

What a waste of money.