ESCAPE FROM THE 21ST CENTURY - Mark Reviews Movies

Escape from the 21st Century, Cineverse

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | June 26, 2025

To attempt to make sense of the plot and time-travel mechanics of Escape from the 21st Century would be an act of folly. Writer/director Li Yang certainly seems to understand what he's doing with this time-jumping tale, in which a trio of teenagers find themselves inexplicably in the bodies of their 20-years-older selves. Once it becomes obvious that trying to dissect the rules and excuse the paradoxes of the film's version of time travel would probably take too long, one realizes it's simply better to trust Li's confidence in the story he's telling.

Ultimately, that story has little to do with actual time travel or the fiendish plot that takes the focus of the third act, which just adds even more wrinkles and contradictions and inconsistencies to everything that has already been established about how time traveling works here. It's almost as if Li is telling us to ignore all of that, because any plot featuring time travel is going to be incoherent or absurd on at least some level. The film has a sense of style and a surprising heart that come through even stronger than any confusion the plot generates. Because that plot is so utterly confounding, that's saying something.

Besides, the whole story doesn't even exist in our world. It's set on a distant planet called Planet K in the year 1999. This, of course, raises several questions on its own, such as how time is actually is measured on this planet, why everyone and everything basically looks as if they're on Earth, and how our narrator is aware of the existence of a faraway sister planet to make the distinction in the first place. The answers, probably, have to do with separating this story from our knowledge of how physics do or metaphysics might operate and, on a more pragmatic level, with removing the setting from China, where it was filmed, to avoid any kind of governmental backlash.

None of this really matters, anyway, because for all intents and purposes these characters are human and the setting is as familiar as anything on our little life-filled ball in the universe. The setup follows three teenagers—popular and tough Chengyong (Li Zhouzhao), fairly ordinary Zha (Chen Yichen), nerdy and hefty Paopao (Kang Qixuan)—during the summer of their last year at school.

They're technically adults now, readying themselves for the real world, but it's difficult to let go of the ways of childhood. They still climb the smokestack of an abandoned factory to inscribe their names into the thing. They get into fights with other local teens to maintain their reputations, and Chenyoung is still certain that his romance with Yi (Ma Fanding) will last forever.

Because of that brawl, the three end up in the runoff of the old factory's chemical waste. It gives them a unique power: Any time one of them sneezes, his mind is suddenly transported into his body 20 years into the future. There, an older Chengyong (Song Yang) seemingly works as a doctor for a big corporation. Zha (Zhang Ruoyun) is an investigative journalist looking into said company in that future, and Paopao (Li Chenhao) has become muscular and dates Yi (Zhu Yanmanzi), which could be a big problem for him in both time periods if Chengyoung finds out about it in either one.

The first act of Li's screenplay is, admittedly, a lot to take, because it amounts to a rapid-fire burst of exposition, character establishment and—as the three travel in time one by one—re-establishment, and setting the stakes of plots in both the narrative's future and its present. Li's filmmaking approaches all of this with a similarly breakneck pace, which immediately makes the entire time-travel gimmick indecipherable, because it feels as if we're just catching up with the rules when Li's script pushes it all in an entirely different direction.

It's overwhelming, and that turns out to be to the film's benefit. Once the dynamics of the characters' present and future selves become the focal point, Li can use those as a springboard for humor, action, and even more toying with the mechanics of this strange variation of time travel. There's a very funny bit in which the older Chengyoung becomes determined to find his teenage flame in 2019, and since Paopao is keeping her a secret, Chengyoung's only option is to find a local public servant who knows everyone. The only problem is that she has recently died in a bicycle accident, but the bigger problem is that fate or destiny is apparently set when the teens try to destroy that bicycle—as well as many others—in 1999.

The film's philosophical undertones, then, might feel nihilistic with that idea and especially in the third act, when an apocalyptic event unfolds that would seem to ruin the entire schematic of the story's time traveling. Again, it's best not overthink such things, because simply thinking about them in a normal way is a dead end. Since Li has now provided so much else to chew on and enjoy, the film becomes more grounded in its notions of adolescent optimism facing grown-up reality and its aesthetic flourishes, which include characters becoming partially animated and a villain (played by Wu Xiaoliang) whose fighting style has developed from a couple decades of playing a specific fighting video game.

The point is that Escape from the 21st Century isn't a film to analyze on a plot level, unless one wants a really, really bad headache. It's one to experience for its humor, style, and heart—all of which are ample.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products