a review of 异世降临

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT ONE: Definitely not the worst small-budget ALIEN homage/ripoff I've ever seen, and executed with a certain level of ambition and intention, but also not really interesting enough on its own merits (mostly visual) to make it more than just yet another ALIEN homage/ripoff. Suffers from having a pretty straightforward narrative that gets mangled in typical amnesiac-protagonist noir fashion. When we finally do get the pieces in the right order, the actual chain of events ends up being way less interesting than we initially imagined. Flying Lotus does add some interesting visual touches that feel of a piece with his previous film, the gonzo gross-out comedy KUSO, but his anime-inflected psychedelic CGI creations don't entirely mesh with the rest of the more standard future-industrial production design. Watched this on Shudder, where the dark photography/flashing lights and heavy compression rendered several sequences of this movie so pixelated as to be extremely distracting. If it turns up on a service with full HD I might give it another chance to see if it makes a better visual impression.