Three Men on a Sand Dune: Techno Warriors

This screening was part of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Weird Wednesday series. For upcoming shows, click here.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing on the silver screen and it was just three dudes walking around a sand dune.

I’ve spent a week racking my brain around this moment. No matter what wild, over-the-top, ridiculous part I replay in my head, I always return to this: three guys, dressed in Mad-Mex-meets-Dragon-Ball black-leather armor, taking moments to pose and to discuss which direction they should walk, making their way around a sand dune, so, so, so slowly.

I was at a screening of Techno Warriors, a late-90s Hong Kong response to the newest word on the world cinema street: movie studios were making bank on adapting video game franchises for the silver screen. Video games were the entertainment giant of the 90s and the built-in excitement of one-vs-one fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter felt designed for the Hong Kong action cinema treatment.

Philip Ko, writer-director of Techno Warriors, helms this project with what feels like a genuine love for both action cinema and action games. He saw what was possible with bringing together gaming and filmgoing fans and came up with something unique to the genre that would satisfy both audiences: a Tron-like device of having the characters from the real world interact with the characters in the game. Not only would audiences see their favorite characters on-screen, but they would see themselves, the player, reflected in the world they loved.

Philip Ko then had another brilliant idea: skip the whole, time-consuming “adapting a well-known video game” thing (too expensive) and just make stuff up. Techno Warriors is about the endless battle between the mighty eponymous heroes and their antagonists, The Black Ninjas, in the world of a video game called Techno Warriors. This game is enjoyed and programmed by a guy named Bryan, who, in an act of sheer boredom, teleports his friend Brenda into the game. This act opens a portal between the real world and the gaming world, allowing The Black Ninjas to escape and kidnap their god Bryan, but then the Techno Warriors save him, briefly, until he ends up a prisoner of Dinosaur, who used to be a Black Ninja, but Dinosaur left and is now persona non-grata to The Black Ninjas, even though some of them helped Dinosaur kidnap Bryan, but don’t help Dinosaur when the Techno Warriors, including cyber cop Princess, who makes her one and only appearance in the film here after being introduced at the beginning of the film in a “character select screen” montage, show up with Bryan’s brother to stop Dinosaur and rescue Bryan.

If the above story summary made your head spin a little bit, you are not alone. Even in the somewhat-straightforward English dub, the film skips over questions like how does Bryan manage to teleport real people into the game, why alliances seem to fluctuate depending on the presence of Dinosaur, and even how certain fights in the film end. Attempts to fact-check my own recollection led me to an edited Tamil-language rip of the film (important note: I do not understand Tamil) and movie-database plot summaries that all contained their own inaccuracies. Just like overly-complicated games, Techno Warriors needed a strategy guide.

Through the storytelling haze, what wowed and captivated me about Techno Warriors was how Philip Ko and his company took the poetics and experience of 90s fighting games and merged them into cinema in a way that previous adaptations hadn’t. Techno Warriors is an action video game brought to life. While this may seem obvious when you see the costume department cribbing the style of M. Bison from Street Fighter and Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat for the big bads of the film, Philip Ko goes deeper than costumes and visual references. Techno Warriors, in a sense, transcends what video game films had been by incorporating gaming-specific elements into the cinematography, direction, and editing of the film. Instead of just seeing the adaptation of gaming content, I believe we are seeing the adaptation of the gaming experience itself.

The looping character motions, performed by the actors between big Wire-Fu barrages of feet, call to mind the efforts to make stationary characters seem like they’re alive. The swinging, weightless camera motion, in its attempt to give every portion of the fight scenes some liveliness, looks more like a digital viewfinder operating in a virtual space. The digital effects, some that are implemented with a keen eye for details and others that look like poorly-compressed JPEGs, reflect the balance between life-like replication and cartoony sci-fi violence that action-oriented games wrestled with throughout the 90s, especially with exciting developing technologies like full-motion video.

Not only do the visual aesthetics of fighting games populate the design of the film, but the inclusion of the third party, Bryan, the gamer and programmer, adds something that has never been seen in video game adaptation: the experience of playing games reflected through editing. Not only do we see Bryan’s direct actions influencing the characters, shown through a VR headset device that tracks Bryan’s motions, but Bryan’s emotions propel the editing of the film. In the world of his virtual reality headset, where much of the film takes place, Bryan moves from game to game, matchup to matchup, and, sometimes, shot to shot, with what can only be described as a “mashing the ‘A’ button to skip” level of attention span. Outside of the game world, editing has a more traditional rhythm, but inside the game world, editing is all about action and getting to the next thing. Some fights don’t have winners and some shots end mid-action, all in service of one thing: the player’s, and the audience’s, enjoyment.

Even in a film filled with exciting action and a need to get to the next point, occasionally sacrificing cohesion to get there, there are moments of stillness. Beautiful shots of forests, ancient temples, and sculptures of fantastical idols that feel like the establishment frames of the level your character will soon be competing in. We see some characters meditate or simply wait for the entrance of their next foe, a foe that might be a giant sphinx shooting lasers out of its eyeballs. Sometimes, that moment of stillness manifests itself with the longest shot in the world of three dudes, dressed in their all-black, leather-daddy cop outfits, walking and posing on the way to wait for their enemy. They will cross a sand dune, surrounded by the wreckage of a lost civilization, and achieve absolutely nothing in the middle of a film so desperate to convince an audience that they are experiencing the exact emotions and feelings from playing Mortal Kombat, just without the Mortal Kombat.

A week later, thinking about this long walk across a sandy nothingness, you will realize they did just that. Philip Ko and company accomplished in their wild, wild movie what had never been done in a video game adaptation: they adapted a loading screen.