Battlefield: Fall of the World (2022) User Reviews

Good Acting & Direction Let Down by Poor SFX and Script

[jethrojohn · 5/10 · 4 June 2023]

I was looking forward to this one, since I really enjoyed the (much higher budget) Warriors of Future, another last stand of humanity against aliens picture.

To be fair, that film's budget for the buffet table was probably more than this entire production's combined, so I won't judge it on the same level.

Our story is here is pretty simple. Alien threat has landed. Humans are pretty screwed.

It all starts with humanity's last stand, that doesn't go very well at all. Literally everyone gets killed. All humanity's weapons do nothing and they tear through the troops like tissue paper.

Our hero jumps into a Hummer and speeds off, which is why he survives. To be fair to him, he's not a trained soldier, just a new recruit thrown into the thick of it. And the film deals with his redemption arc and one last ditch attempt to take out the alien scum.

It's a decent premise for a B movie. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes apparent that time and budget were working against the team behind this, as the SFX are not great. They look very early-2000s, and even if the alien design is pretty cool, it can't cover the dated visuals and oddly-lifeless explosions, which are all CG.

Even the gunshots are CG, which is fine most times, except here it is really, painfully obvious, as the extras didn't get any training in weapon handling, so they kind of just wave them about in the air and judder them a bit.

I got used to it after a while. But sadly there's nothing much else that keeps you going.

The script is pretty basic and cliche-ridden, and doesn't do much to keep you engaged. All the english-speaking actors do okay, but you can see them struggling with what is obviously their second language.

The Chinese actors do very well, giving really committed performances. If the script had been better they'd have had more of a chance. As it is, they're worth watching for what they could do next, and I hope they get more opportunities.

The same can be said of the direction, which is pretty great. Some grand sweeping shots and good staging. It's way above what you'd get in a low-budget American movie like this, which will point a camera vaguely in the direction of the actors and that will be it. Here the camera moves during the action, we get good tracking shots, and some gorgeously stages and lit vistas.

But the effects don't get any better, sadly. Which I could have lived with, if the script had been fleshed out.

It is a darn shame, really, cause you can tell everyone that worked on this worked really hard to make a decent movie. They did the best they could with what they had, and tried their darndest.

Time and budget worked against them. And that's really sad.

why this movie looks cheep and at the end it is not good.

[Sandre-Monroe · 4/10 · 1 September 2023]

All the peoples who work on this movie have my respect concerning the special effects. It is a very hard work, a team effort to create something very clean.

BUT and holy cow, it is a big one :

What the hell the producers do ?

In the coming lines i will explain THE ABSOLUTE rules to follow to do a movie even with a poor budget, and it will look like pro.

Any movies who follow these rules will work.

1 - 25 or 24 fps NEVER EVER do a 60 fps frame rate.

It is for video game and even video games for 3d cgi use 24 fps.

60 fps looks plastic.

2 - always exaggerate. Motion blur and moves.

3 - use focal and blurts into explosions - blur into movement

4 - if 1 effect looks cheep into the middle of 1000 who looks great, redo the effects or everything will be lost.

5 - musics and bgm need to follow action, need to be 50% of the action, do not put a music over the top it will not work, or do it for less 2 minutes to a special shot or scene. If the bgm are bad the movie is bad. If the OST are bad the movie is bad.

6 - stupid characters, cliché acting, over reaction and sunglasses by night are for comedies not for serious apocalyptic movies.

And you know what ?

Producers DO NOT FOLLOW ANY OF THESE RULES at ALL !

They do the exact opposite.

And this is why a movie who cost millions and have a not so bad story, looks like a end of studies' project.

What a waste of money.

Mindless sci-fi action...

[paul_haakonsen · 4/10 · 14 January 2024]

Of course I had never heard about this 2022 Chinese sci-fi action movie titled "Zhandi: Yìzhong Haojie" (aka "Battlefield Fall of the World") prior to stumbling upon it here in 2024 by random chance. And of course I opted to sit down and watch it given the recent years flood of creature features that has been spewing forth from the Chinese cinema; some good, some not so good.

Writers Dada Huang and Zhaosheng Huang put together an entertaining enough script for the movie. It is mindless entertainment, where you just grab your snack, lean back and enjoy the humans vs. Aliens action on the screen. There is very little to think about in the movie, and it doesn't make much of any sense; especially when you see how the aliens effortlessly tore through platoons of soldiers, and yet we are to believe that three sole survivors are capable of overcoming the alien overlord invasion. Sure...

The narrative in the movie was dull and slow paced, so very, very slow paced. I ended up giving up on finish watching the movie about halfway through. By then I was just so bored with the lack of any real story progress, and the stale narrative, that I just didn't want to keep watching.

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, but the Chinese cast were nicely cast and put on good performances, whereas the non-Chinese cast put on mostly dubious and questionable performances, especially the platoon leader in the beginning of the movie.

Visually then "Zhandi: Yìzhong Haojie" was okay. The CGI effects are good, but of course not a match for the top of the line Hollywood productions. But for a Chinese movie such as this, then the effects were actually quite good.

My rating of director Zhaosheng Huang's 2022 movie "Zhandi: Yìzhong Haojie" lands on a four out of ten stars.

Asian Starship Troopers Meets Battlefield Earth

[rdfranciscritic · 4 September 2023]

STATESIDE streamers will be quick to dismiss China's alien invasion doppelganger (discovered on Tubi) to Hong Kong's recent Warriors of the Future (watched on Netflix) as an "Asylum-styled" film* (code for "poor CGI" and even worse acting). And while Warriors for the win, I enjoyed both, equally.

Granted, Asian cinema lacks the funding of US analogous, big-budgeted CGI fests (such as the recent, US box office bombs Geostorm and Moonfall; they really are awful), but China's recent offerings (such as the fun, post-apoc'er Mad Shelia* and the epic, world-disaster piece, The Wandering Earth*) hold their own against any domestic, major studio film. While streaming audience will say BFW's proceedings are all familiarly cribbed from those US-made space-disaster films: all of the usual disaster and monster film, half-hour preambles rife with expositional character development before the catastrophe hits, is excised. Battlefield gets right to the Independence Day-inspired action and that's appreciated.

IN THE YEAR 2042, a race of arachnoids invades Earth from a parallel universe to plunder the planet's fresh water supply (destroying New York and Paris with effective CGI set designs). These 15-foot tall insectoid primates (with multi-eyed heads; they stand erect like man, yet run like dogs) are nasty: they come out of nowhere into a battlefield via a transporter beam; they're clad in force-field body armor impervious to Earth weapons; they sport armor-piercing spikes and disintegration weapons (one reminds of the "Death Blossom" from the '80s Star Wars knockoff, The Last Starfighter). The bugs have long-since defeated the world's armies and only China's arm of the world's Union Defense Army -- complete with a genetically-engineered "Team Sparta" -- remains to fight the good fight.

During a battle to protect the last power grid (if it falls, what's left of the Earth will die), Team Sparta is wiped out. Private Cheng Ling, that battle's lone survivor, comes in contact with a ragtag group of desert soldier-survivors for the final showdown -- with an electro-magnetic weapon cultivated from "blue crystals" used in the arachnoids' armor.

WHILE I ENJOYED The Wandering Earth immensely, its English-dub was disappointing (watch the subtitled version); the occasional dubbing in BFW (when the dialog flips languages) is effectively-produced and the English subtitles (for the Chinese) are in-sync and easy-to-follow. Unlike a US-made Asylum flick: the mostly Chinese, yet international cast, is professionally effective in selling the drama against their post-production, green-screened nemeses. There's no "bad acting," here and Zhaosheng Huang is, in fact, a great director of a major, US-studio quality. Now, that I am aware of his works, I am seeking out his previous films, Red Water (2021) and Sniper (2020). The IMDb user reviews I gleaned on those two films aren't kind; if they're valid assessments, I'd have to say Huang's skill sets improved immensely, here. BFW is certainly closer to a Micheal Bay bayos n' bayhem festival than they are an Asylum mockbuster.

Most will complain about the "video game level," CGI set design of BFW, especially when the bugs show up. Sure, at times, the CGI bugs -- particularly during interior set pieces -- stumbles, slightly on occasion, but the exterior CGI is production solid. In fact, the CGI faux pas, here, reminds of the budget-bloated, hit-and-miss computerized moments in I Am Legend -- anytime when Will Smith encountered those annoying, panting blue vampires.

* If you look under "critic reviews," you'll find my B&S About Movies' reviews for Mad Shelia and The Wandering Earth, as well as Asylum's Asteroid-a-Geddon, Collision Earth, and Meteor Moon. Under "user reviews," I reviewed Asylum's newest falling-rock offering (via Tubi): Doomsday Meteor.