The Red Sparrow

Chinese sci-fi isn't exactly booming. There have been some attempts to get it off the ground, but you can see by the meager numbers of simpler genre films released that the demand simply isn't there yet. The Red Sparrow is a fun little genre effort, but it isn't going to be the film that will spark a major rise in Chinese sci-fi.

The Guardian Angels are a group dedicated to the betterment of humankind. They have created the first bionic human, the Ron Group wants the technology for more evil purposes. Defending the newborn child, all the Guardian Angels die, but they do manage to keep the baby out of the hands of the Ron Group. Twenty years later, she is found again.

The design language isn't too original, there's a strong reliance on CG, and the plot is a cut-and-paste job from other genre efforts. On the positive side, there aren't many hardcore sci-fi films around nowadays, and the team did have quite a bit of fun with the purer genre element. Certainly not a terrible film, but not up to par with China's martial arts output quite yet.