★★★½
“Run Xia Tian Run”
China seems to have discovered SF in a big way of late, most recently with The Wandering Earth, the biggest blockbuster you’ve probably never heard of. At time of writing, it’s the #7 film at the world-wide box-office this year, though 99% of its tally came in its home country. A couple of years earlier, this film made much less impact, yet for me is superior. It’s a time-travel piece, not dissimilar to Run Lola Run, with a triptych repeating the same events in three different ways, as the heroine strives to achieve a satisfactory outcome.
Xia Tian (Yang) is a research scientist working on time-travel for a corporation. She’s got to the point where they can send things back 110 minutes, though the process is imperfect for organic material. This attracts the attention of a rival company, who send Tsui Hu (Huo) after Xia. He kidnaps her son, Dou Dou (Zhang), as leverage to force her to hand over the research data. After Dou Dou is killed at the handover. Xia decides to use the time-machine to send herself back, effectively getting a do-over. And when things still don’t go as planned, it’s back for another attempt.
There are two main differences to Lola. Firstly, we have multiple heroines all occupying the same time-line, so there are three Xia Tians running around simultaneously, trying to save Dou Dou. Secondly, due to the imperfections of the process, they have different personalities, becoming steadily more aggressive. If you’ve seen Michael Keaton’s clone film Multiplicity, you’ll understand the idea. This is a result of the time-travel actually being hopping across parallel universes, a bit of a needlessly confusing detail, which we could have done without. Just handwave on the specific process – or, as Lola did, omit them entirely.
Yet there remains plenty to enjoy here, not least Yang’s performance as Xia #1, #2 and #3. It’s the kind of thing which could become horribly confusing, yet the subtle differences in the three versions of her, help them remain distinct, right to the end. Unsurprisingly, this site was particularly fond of the final iteration, which prefers to shoot first and ask questions later. However, all three have their moments, whether it’s driving at speed through a dockside obstacle course, of whipping up an impromptu smoke-bomb in an elevator, from a few household chemicals in the proper proportions
The production values here are equally impressive, slickly depicting a future China (2025, to be precise) which is so clean you could eat your dinner off it. The set-pieces are particularly effective, such as Xia’s escape from the towering facility which houses her research, climaxing in a near-fall into the Garbage Disposal From Hell. There are elements which require the suspension of disbelief e.g. Xia surviving a car-crash into the bottom of a gorge, then being right back at her office in the next scene. It’s still a fresh and original concept, exactly the kind of thing which Hollywood desperately needs in the genre of late.
Dir: Chang
Star: Yang Mi, Wallace Huo, Chin Shih-chieh, Hummer Zhang