But no, once I started the movie and paused it, I saw that the "the" was missing.
I have to think this was an intentional choice in the translation and not some sort of botched job that they used to joke about on websites like Engrish.com, before that became problematic. (The website still exists. That doesn't mean it's not problematic.) Oh, I think I neglected to mention that the movie hails from Hong Kong.
However, one of the first bits of on-screen text made me wonder.
When I first saw this:
I thought it said "BIG TEMPORARY COMMAND CENTER," which I thought was hilarious. The salient characteristic about the temporary command center was that it was big, but otherwise completely anonymous.
Of course, rewinding I saw that it was B16, not BIG. But combined with the missing article in the title, I thought this movie might be destined for the Engrish hall of fame.
I enjoyed the movie reasonably well. It has a lot of FX shots and I thought for the most part, they were well done. The technology and aliens that appear here are imaginative, if they don't have quite the tactility and three-dimensionality that you'd get from the most expensive CG going today. However, for a movie without those resources, good job I say.
The thing that prevents me from quite recommending the movie is its terrible acting. You don't always notice bad acting in films that are in other languages, since one of the key signifiers of bad acting is an inability to put the emphasis on the right syllable. In another language, you have no idea what the right syllable is.
But in this case, I could tell this acting was bad. This guy is the poster child of it:
This is actor Nick Cheung, and he has this expression on his face for literally his entire screen time.
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