Touted as Hong Kong’s first radiation-disaster blockbuster, Anthony Pun’s Cesium Fallout chronicles the political and frontline responses to a nationwide disaster because it unfolds on the outskirts of town. Emulating the blockbusters of Irwin Allen and Roland Emmerich, the rampant city destruction is complemented by a star-studded ensemble of a few of the native industry’s most distinguished expertise. Andy Lau takes prime billing because the scientist drafted to advise Karen Mok’s bullheaded politician when a fireplace breaks out in a landfill web site riddled with unlawful radioactive waste. As the management bickers over the suitable response and who’s to be reprimanded, it falls to the blue collar heroes of the Hong Kong Fire Services Department to sort out the inferno head on.
Yu Bai and Louise Wong are among the many heroes in helmets placing their lives on the road for the sake of seven million harmless souls, however the metropolis’s atypical civilian inhabitants is nearly totally absent from the unfolding drama. The destiny of Hong Kong itself is within the steadiness — a notion that inevitably fuels some doubtlessly potent political subtext. Other notable solid members embrace Bowie Lam as town’s fireplace chief, Michael Wong because the slippery businessman who owns the catastrophe web site, Fish Liew as a pregnant radio responder, DeeGor Ho as a younger firefighter trapped inside the blaze, and veteran martial artist David Chiang as town’s absent chief govt.
Writer Mak Tin-shu, whose credit embrace final 12 months’s milestone alien invasion extravaganza Warriors of Future, offsets the motion with a beneficiant showering of overwrought melodrama, as is to be anticipated from such a bombastic crowdpleaser. Yet, between the tearful histrionics and noble breast-beating, he succeeds in injecting just a few notable moments of barbed satire.
The motion unfolds in 2007, a decade on from the handover that noticed Hong Kong’s sovereignty return to China following greater than 150 years of British rule, but notably earlier than most of the metropolis’s newer turbulent troubles. While town stays affluent, there may be rising concern over a lingering British change to Hong Kong’s customs protocols. Shortly earlier than the handover, politician Simon Fan (Lau) helped introduce laws that allowed town to grow to be a dumping floor for unregulated “digital waste” from abroad. Fan’s spouse, a firefighter, died in a container port blaze attributable to simply such incendiary waste, which prompts him to give up politics and depart town. His brother-in-law, Kit (Yu), additionally within the fireplace service, holds Fan personally accountable, which causes inevitable friction when Fan is recalled into the fold to advise on the present escalating disaster.
Cesium Fallout marks Pun’s third time on the helm of a function movie, following 2017’s Extraordinary Mission and final 12 months’s One More Chance, a knowingly nostalgic comedy throwback for veteran main man Chow Yun Fat. For greater than three many years, nevertheless, Pun has served as one of many native industry’s most revered cinematographers, lensing most of the late Benny Chan’s motion footage, from Gen-X Cops (1999) to The White Storm (2013), in addition to final 12 months’s A Guilty Conscience, at present the all-time highest incomes Hong Kong movie on the native box office.
Pun serves as his personal director of images right here, which matches an extended method to making certain that the unfolding mayhem retains a visible coherence, even when the narrative threatens to grow to be unshackled. Beyond the blazes and explosions, Pun additionally presents numerous photos that will likely be immediately recognizable to anybody who lived within the metropolis by means of the pandemic or the previous protests. Couple these scenes with a wavering, self-serving feminine figurehead, within the type of Mok’s appearing Chief Executive Cecilia Fong, who surrounds herself with cowardly division heads beholden to protocol and incapable of initiative, and Cesium Fallout teases at a satirical starvation beneath its brash exterior.
Too usually, nevertheless, the manufacturing feels as if it’s being pulled in opposing instructions by conflicting commitments to appease a number of masters. For each depiction of inept management there’s a reminder that the catastrophe itself was triggered by the presence of overseas pollution. Only by means of the virtuous actions of noble members of the Disciplined Services is there any hope for peace and stability to be reinstated within the area. This strategy aligns with numerous current mainland movies, together with Flashover (2023) and The Rescue (2020), which showcase the formidable heroics of the hearth service and the Coast Guard in a way that was beforehand reserved for army footage, and play extra like recruitment movies than real entertainment.
Over the course of 130-odd boisterous, breathless minutes, Cesium Fallout bombards its viewers with a cacophony of senseless destruction and muddled messaging, but by some means fails for example simply what it’s that these people are so courageously combating for. Hong Kong itself — so usually a palpable and intoxicating atmosphere on display — is nearly fully inert, as if town has already been evacuated and there may be nothing left to avoid wasting.
Title: Cesium Fallout
International Sales: Edko Films
Director: Anthony Pun
Screenwriter: Mak Tin-Shu
Cast: Andy Lau, Yu Bai, Karen Mok, Louise Wong
Release Date: November 1, 2024 (Hong Kong and China); November 8 (U.S.)
Running time: 2 hr 16min
Content Source: deadline.com