Escape from the 21st Century (2024): everything, everywhere, even more than that (Review)

Do you think, when he went into the vocal booth for the first Kung Fu Panda film, Jack Black knew he was changing film history forever? Probably – it seems like the sort of thing he’d say to psych himself up. But even he probably couldn’t have guessed that the first of Po’s adventures would spark a debate in China on why an accessible, entertaining film so rooted in Chinese culture had to be made by Hollywood. At the time, China was jockeying with India for the prize of crossover success in the US. Somewhere along the line, both those nations remembered that they have over a billion inhabitants, and as such they don’t need to team up with anyone else to make super-profitable films. The results have been more successful than anyone could have predicted; the Chinese animation Ne Zha 2 recently became the first film to gross a billion dollars from a single territory.

Li Yang’s Escape from the 21st Century, released on digital platforms by Signature Entertainment and coming to Blu-Ray on 24th March, can’t boast that level of success. But it does feel like a product of the same thought process that led to the Kung Fu Panda-inspired overhaul of Chinese film production; the feeling when you see a foreign film that speaks so clearly to your people and their culture that you’re compelled to make a domestic version. In the case of Escape from the 21st Century, the inspiration might well be Everything Everywhere All At Once. The film is far from a carbon copy of the Daniels’ multiple-Oscar-winner, and it definitely has its own identity, characters and ideas. Even so, if you’re in the market for a hyperactive, high-concept science fiction comedy with Chinese lead characters about the possibility of free will in a fundamentally absurd universe, good news – someone’s made a second one.

In Everything Everywhere All At Once, the key to exploring the characters’ potential is the multiverse. In Escape from the 21st Century, it’s time travel, albeit explored from the other end of the telescope to the one the title implies. The film starts off in 1999, with the three young heroes constantly victimised by the local bullies. It’s far from a nostalgic paradise, then, but Li Yang turns out to be the kind of director who can make a toxic waste spill into an iridescent visual wonder. The three friends fall into the aforementioned rainbow slick of chemicals, and come out with an unusual ability – every time they sneeze, they’re blasted twenty years into the future.

As ridiculous as that central idea is – and the film knows it’s ridiculous – there’s still something weirdly sincere in Escape from the 21st Century. You won’t find it in the film’s style, which is antic enough to make Everything Everywhere All At Once look like a seven-hour Lav Diaz movie. Early on, a character responds to a taunt about his haircut by saying it’s “the Hong Kong style”, and the same could be said for the film itself; any admirers of the live-action cartoon style of those early Stephen Chow films will find a modern-day successor here. The other influence might be the constant cutaway gags of post-Simpsons adult animation, an influence made explicit when one character’s fantasy of having rotor blades fitted to his head is animated in the style of South Park. (Well, they are from 1999) These are overwhelming, but they do achieve a strange sledgehammer emotional power. When a character receives bad news, Yang cuts to stock footage of a glacier collapsing; when the score needs to pump you up for a big action beat, it cuts to the drummer producing the drumroll on the soundtrack.

As effective as they are, these moments aren’t the core of sincerity I alluded to above. You could equally read them as a way of ironising the movie’s emotional content, rather than reinforcing it, no different to the cartoon speed-lines and ’60s Batman “pow!” effects that are sometimes animated over the action scenes. Nor is the film’s message reducible to merely wishing for the good old days, despite lines where the characters wish they could “make the summer of 1999 last forever” or “stay in 1999 forever”. It’s certainly true that the 21st century they sneeze themselves into is a dystopian one; the first thing we see of this ‘future’ is a black-market organ-trafficking ring being busted. As per the dictates of hauntology, the past now looks more futuristic than the future, with the horizons and skies of 1999 full of space rockets and a giant moon.

Wait – a giant moon? Yes, and this is the thing that’s most haunting about Escape from the 21st Century. The film is nominally set on “Planet K”, and the alien skyline is the most obvious sign of this. But Planet K’s inhabitants all look like Chinese humans, humans who share cultural experiences like stanning pop stars, playing video games and having a pre-internet pornography stash under your mattress. Their cultural experiences, like South Park and Street Fighter 2, are all stubbornly Earthly and period-appropriate. At one point, they watch a black-and-white newsreel from 1945 which is full of talk about the war. Did Planet K really have a war in 1945, which they documented in black-and-white newsreels? If so, what a coincidence.

Clearly, Li Yang is not expending even the slightest effort at world-building in his depiction of Planet K, which has to be deliberate if only because the rest of the film is so packed with ideas. You are absolutely meant to recognise this planet as an only slightly set-dressed version of China, which lends new weight to the film’s twenty-year time gap. If Yang merely wanted his characters to be confronted by the 21st century, he could have had their sneezes take them forward 25 years, landing them neatly in the film’s year of release. Instead, they go forward twenty years to 2019, the year which ended with the first Covid-19 cases being detected in China – and they first end up in a hospital, too. Yang’s decision to make 2019 stand in for all the disappointments, all the lost possibilities, all the lost innocence of the 21st century is clearly freighted with meaning. By setting the film on a fictional planet that’s clearly ours, he adds a little distance to this very raw, contentious issue while also making it crystal clear what the film is really about.

It’s a little ballast to anchor a film which is otherwise so giddy on its own inventions that it could drift into the upper atmosphere. To return to the Everything Everywhere all at Once comparison, that film scrupulously obeyed the emotional structure of a standard Hollywood script even as it tossed the usual rules of cause-and-effect into the bin; audiences who couldn’t follow why the universe was being destroyed by a bagel and what it had to do with Ratatouille will at least have a familiar rise-and-fall to hang onto. There are moments in Escape from the 21st Century, by contrast, where Yang seems to be trying to cram the entire emotional landscape of a standard film into each scene. It means the ending, when it comes, lacks a bit of punch because the film has crescendoed so many times already.

Still, the ending is at least a surpassingly beautiful shot, and it stays true to the film’s dual yearning for both an idealised past and a better future. If Escape from the 21st Century is an overload it’s at least a delightful overload, a film that defines the concept that a movie can be anything it wants to be so long as it’s never boring. The state’s input into Chinese cinema can leave Westerners with the impression that these films are all stodgy propaganda epics. From its 98-minute run-time to its breathless pace – and, perhaps, its subtext – Escape from the 21st Century comprehensively defies that stereotype.

Graham’s Archive – Escape from the 21st Century