Animal World (Han Yan)

[Stay Puft]

ANIMAL WORLD
Dir. Han Yan



IMDb page

[Stay Puft]

Looking back over 2018 films to start prepping my lists and noticed I forgot to make a few threads. I saw this opening weekend (it opened just a week or two before Ant-Man and the Wasp). I'm willing to bet I'm the only person here who saw it. I actually sort of enjoyed it, but gonna vote nay, because there's a lot of stupidity dragging it down. If this had just focused on all the game theory stuff on the boat, it would have been a fine piece of (slick, superficial, even vapid, but that's fine!) entertainment. There's all this other junk though involving the main character turning into a clown and fighting bad CGI monsters and none of it has anything to do with the main plot and it turns out none of it was in the source material. It's just a bunch of junk this particular Chinese adaptation invents, inexplicably ballooning the budget. But I guess the idea is you gotta spend money to make money, and China wanted a blockbuster, and China got a blockbuster (they paid to get Michael Douglas in here and replaced Ant-Man with this film in their own market, due to the blackout summer season). There's apparently going to be a trilogy so godspeed.

Not really recommended. But I might watch the sequel. But you didn't read that.