Escape From The 21st Century

Three friends gain the ability to send their consciousness 20 years into the future whenever they sneeze. Finding a bleak world waiting for them, they decide to fix the future by changing its past, their present, but it all hinges on one question: Who exactly did they loan their copy of Street Fighter II on SNES to?

You may recall, in late October of 2024, I traveled to Trieste, Italy.

A port city in the far northeastern corner of Italy, Trieste is a mix of Italian, Austro-Hungarian, and Slovenian influences set hard up against the head of the Gulf of Trieste in the Adriatic Sea. Known as the “City of Coffee,” it was considered to be the end-point of the maritime leg of the famous trade route known as the Silk Road, and was an important deep-water port owned by the House of Habsburg, an aristocratic family that was as powerful as it was inbred. These days, Trieste is just a nice little seaside city, recently featured in the film Heads of State, and every October, it has a film festival called the Trieste Science Fiction Festival. It’s really nice. If you have the means, I highly recommend going.

So, when I was there in October of 2024, I saw several films, but this one, Escape From The 21st Century, a Chinese science fiction comedy film written and directed by Li Yang in his feature-length directional debut, was not one of them. It was one that I would have liked to seen, but I missed it for one reason or another. It wasn't alone either, there were a couple of films I would've seen, if I could've. And now all of those movies are streaming, so I'm catching up.

So...

Set on the distant fictional planet K, three high school students, Wang Zha, Chengyong, and Paopao, after being thrown into an industrial waste run-off pool by some bullies, gain the ability to travel 20 years into the future, into bodies of their future selves, and then back again, whenever they sneeze. However, they each discover that their respective future selves live terrible lives in a dark world, and that each one of them are immersed in the middle of a dark conspiracy...

So they decide to try to fix the future.

Complicating their effort is the way their teenage dynamic has changed in the future. In 1999, Chengyong is the heartthrob devoted to his girlfriend, Yang Yi, the most popular girl in school, but in the future, he discovers that he has lost Yang Yi, and is now a thug involved in an organ trafficking racket. Zha has grown up to be an investigative journalist, focused on breaking the corporate stranglehold on the world, but he is mired in a dying industry, hobbled by those same corporations, and also, is in hopelessly in love with his colleague, a woman named Liu Lainzhi, who is too badass for him, and not interested at all. Pao Pao, meanwhile, who was the chubby third of their trio in 1999, just happy to be included, discovers that in the future, he is handsome and strong and very fit, and also living with Yang Yi, his secret crush, but she has spiraled into drug dependency and depression. Worst of all, none of the three boys are friends with each other anymore.

In short, their lives have all taken darker turns, and the things that they thought they wanted have soured.

This causes a wedge, one that has already driven their future selves apart, to form between the boys in 1999. They then spend some time agonizing over their various futures. Is it Chengyong’s fault that he is a criminal in the future, or is it due to the medical debt that resulted from his father’s bills? Wang Zha is dismayed to see that the future has become so corrupted and ugly, and that the thing he thought would be most effective against this corruption, the act of exposing it to the public, is in fact, helpless and ineffectual. Pao Pao is forced to confront the fact that despite his future self getting everything that he thought he wanted in 1999, it did nothing to alleviate his self-esteem issues.

But when a seemingly unbeatable villain discovers their abilities, and how to replicate them, initiating a plan to control the future by destroying the past, the boys come together, dedicating themselves to using the intervening 20 years to become superheroes, in order to save a world on the brink of destruction.

But will that even be enough…?

Escape From The 21st Century is a film of energy and invention, a coming-of-age story, a sci-fi thriller, a martial arts comedy, and a teen romance all at once.

It’s a visual delight, blending a bunch of cyberpunk shit, crazy martial arts, a very loosely-defined kind of time travel, and some good moments of levity into a mix of very kinetic styles reminiscent of Scott Pilgrim and Monty Python. It’s a film about the unrealized dreams of youth, that adulthood is where idealism goes to die, and the horror of living a life of regrets, all while facing a maniacal plot by an evil time-traveling corporation, who plans to harvest bodies in the past, in order to rule the future. But mostly, it's a film about how shit gets kind of complicated as an adult, and that time passes in a blink of an eye. Literally, you sneeze and you miss it.

Most of all, it’s very wacky.

It’s also a bit of a tonal mess. It’s light and playful one moment, and the next it attempts to be super dark. Plus, the rules noticeably get pretty wonky, especially when it comes to the question of what can and can’t be changed in the past, if you want to change the future, or how exactly it is that Planet K has everything that our world does, including Street Fighter II on SNES. So, you should be prepared to just ignore that kind of stuff. If you can, what you'll get is a film that looks great, is a lot of fun, and for the most part, does a fairly decent job of obfuscating its otherwise very thin and loosely connected story.

Even if it definitely doesn’t all work, it’s okay, because some of the moments are really great. There’s a moment where the boys are trying to be cool in the future, even though they have never seen a smartphone before and have no idea how to operate it. There’s a fantastic fight scene where they are make each other sneeze, so they can continue the fight in the year where respectively they each have the advantage. And there’s a particularly great sequence where they go on a bicycle destroying spree in order to change the future, only to be stymied at every turn by the self-correcting timeline, and to eventually be stopped cold by a public bike-share program. And the whole climatic fight really is a blast.

It’s fun stuff.

Plus, I appreciate the way that this film doesn’t get too bogged down by fleshing out the specific rules of their version of time travel, mostly because its whole idea of it is a huge mess that I’d rather not get into. Now, personally, when it comes to time travel, I do like my stories to have some rules, because like with zombies, rules don’t limit, they define, right?

I just prefer to know... what’s the situation here?

Is it one timeline, so everything you do in the past is what’s meant to happen, paradoxes be damned? Or is it one timeline, so anything you might change in the past could have potentially massive and surprising changes in the future? Or… is it a multiverse, so anything you change in the past actually just creates a whole new timeline? Or... is the past set, so even if you change things, the future adjusts and somehow still comes out the same? Is your personal timeline always linear, so time in your present is always moving forward at the same pace, meaning that if you’re in the past for years, you’ve been missing in the present for years? Or can you step in and out of the time-stream wherever you want, but you still age the same? Or do you not age, because you’re outside of time? Can you make small changes, but not big ones? Can you revisit the same moment in time multiple times, even if you’ve been there before, and witness other versions of you doing things you have already done, and even change not just the past in general, but specifically your own past actions? Is there a possibly that you could end up in an eternal Temporal War up and down the timeline, waged against a older future version of yourself, a future version that you will eventually become as you age, inevitably switching sides in the war, simply because in the end, time waits for no one?

Questions, questions… honestly, who has the time?

My point is, I appreciate this film not bothering, because the rules here are clearly a nonsensical mess, and sometimes it’s just better not to talk about it, especially as so many genre fans get really upset when shit like time travel “doesn’t make sense” in a story, which is such a dumb thing to expect, that it’s aggravating just seeing a bunch of nerds complaining abut it, because it never makes sense. It never does. It can’t possibly ever make sense. It’s fucking time travel!

Anyway…

I did like how the film does ask the question of what it means to change the future, and that the answer is that while people may not be able to avoid their own fates, they can still control their choices, and the kind of person that they want to be. I liked the implication that personal agency always remains, even though you are sometimes helpless when it comes to changing the whole world.

But, yeah, like I said, not everything works in this film.

There’s no emotional arc for the characters to speak of, as all that stuff is glossed over by a big super-powered kung fu fight, which is awesome, to be clear, but still, it feels a bit perfunctory. Plus, exchanging the small emotional stakes we’ve spent most of the film with for a big whoopty-doo of an action climax just feels a bit like a cop-out. On top of that, the final act is a confusing mess, despite the fact that its obvious endpoint is clearly apparent for some time before the characters realize it, which is annoying. Also, for a film made in the 2020s, there’s a surprising amount of fat jokes in this, and it’s the kind of insensitive asshole shit that hasn’t been seen in pop culture since the early aughts–at least, not outside of the kind of shit that loser dickhead bros who listen to Joe Rogan might find funny. So that strikes a pretty sour note in an otherwise good time.

So, yeah, not everything works, but it’s still a pretty fun time. In the end, Escape From The 21st Century is ultimately just candy.

It’s good candy, but it’s candy nonetheless.