Just watched the Mainland Chinese movie Per Aspera Ad Astra on Netflix. It’s the summer movie I’ve been wanting.
It had a cinematic release earlier this spring and was released on Netflix June 18th.
While set in space, it’s focused on virtual reality and AI. Some have described as a mix of EEAAO and The Matrix. I’d add in a fair dose of high concept Star Trek too.
It’s a fun ride with a good message. Highly recommend it for sci-fi fans looking for a well executed story with competent problem solving and positive values.
Dylan Wang He Di, Victoria Song Qian and Wang Duo deliver a compelling and action packed tale. While I watched with subtitles because the cast all voiced their own parts in the original Mandarin, the English language dub is reportedly excellent. I found the special effects well done (but would really welcome the views of experts here ).
Here’s the synopsis from Netflix:
An AI system lets people live their dreams during space travel, but when a crisis arises a technician must enter the dreamscape to save the passengers.
And here’s a translation of the original promotion for the movie:\
High school student Zhang Qi Meng, focused on preparing for exams, is pulled out of the examination hall by a stranger named Brother Biao, who breaks through the window. He is then informed of a shocking fact: his world is just a virtual metaverse program. In reality, Qi Meng is an astronaut in hibernation, and at this moment, disaster is rapidly approaching their spaceship…
I love your recommendations and thank you for sharing your insights on this film!
Glad to be helpful.
There’s a lot of good stuff coming out of Mainland China in recent years but it’s often marketed in a way that makes it really difficult to know what a show or movie actually is about.
Even opening episodes can be tonally radically different than the rest of a series and the trailers and synopses are often simply deceiving. Tonal whiplash is part of the form.
I had no idea the tone would be different throughout. Thank you for mentioning all of this! I haven’t seen any mainland china productions yet but I do want to check them out.
Sometimes there’s very consistent tone — Mobius is a good example of tight and consistent tone.
But many in other cases there can be jarring juxtapositions in tone.
Shows that start out as slapstick or Lucille Ball type comedies may become very dark and serious in the third quarter.
Sometimes a comedy is defined only by the protagonists not dying in the end and a ‘happily ever after outcome.’ More in the vein of an Ancient Greek definition of comedy.
And more like Shakespeare’s theatre, there can be moments of outright comic relief in the midst of 40 episode nonstop tragedy.
Then, there are the comic non sequitur comments — especially about food preferences— in the middle of fight scenes that originated in Hong Kong action movies (Per Aspera Ad Astra references those).
Hm, interesting. I’m a bit wary of science fiction’s ability to grapple with “AI” while techbros crowbar their glorified Tamagotchi into anything with a chipset — promoting the products with allusions to scifi that the eager marketers clearly haven’t understood.
But I’ll give this a watch on your suggestion that it has Star Trek elements, or vibes 🙂 As long as it isn’t “The measure of a man” with Grok in the defendant’s seat…
Not what you fear at all.
This is definitely a cautionary tale about AI but not a dystopian one.
Looking forward to it. The Chinese scifi I’ve watched hasn’t been great, but I’m hoping this will serve as the gateway I need to start the original language Three body problem series… No pressure!
I’d recommend that you also try the current day action timey-wimey sci-fi thriller Mobius also available on Netflix for another one to get you into Chinese dramas.
Bai Jingting who stars in Mobius is another strong and popular male lead who is doing a significant number of high concept sci-fi shows. He’s also got a superhero parody comedy movie Keep Real coming out in theatres in China this summer. No news on whether an international streamer will pick that one up.
