What’s It About

When a mysterious discovery on the outskirts of a remote Korean harbor town unleashes an unprecedented and devastating creature, the isolated village is plunged into a desperate fight for survival. With the community laying in ruins, a local police chief and a resilient policewoman must forge an uneasy alliance with a rugged group of local hunters. Together, this mismatched team ventures into the treacherous terrain to track down and destroy the relentless predator before it completely erases their home from the map.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

When a movie’s got what it takes, nobody’s gonna give a rat’s a** about how lousy the CGI is. No one’s leaving the theater raging over cheap props as long as the story’s got them choked up. And while we’re on the topic, Na Hong-jin does not present much of a story in his movie Hope either. The movie has just two long chase scenes with a sequel teaser glorifying the film’s end. So here’s what happens. Hope Harbor is a small town in South Korea, and someone has been messing around in the area. Ko Bum-seok, the police chief played by Hwang Jung-min, decides to get into action after witnessing the ruins of a cow. The alien invasion continues, affecting the people of Hope Harbor, too. No one can explain what is happening because all the witnesses are dead, and the one who is alive has suffered so much that it is hard to say whether they were more crazy than those in the first place. The first half-hour of this film is by far the best part. It opens with Bum-seok running through the streets, following the sounds of screams and explosions, as he seems to be always a step behind the mysterious creature in question. The protagonist, who wears a leather jacket and high-heeled shoes, clearly wasn’t expecting that he’d have to survive an apocalypse. The director keeps the creature off-screen, utilizing the same technique that made the shark from Jaws terrifying long after you actually stopped seeing it. You only see the aftermath of the destruction, and it is much scarier than what you can actually see. When Bum-seok gets to what’s left of the village, he bumps into my favorite characters in this flick: a bunch of people who are way past retirement age, heavily armed, ready for anything, and full of stories and useful advice, not to mention a whole lot of weapons. ‘Where’d you get this?’ Bum-seok keeps asking, and every time it made people in my cinema laugh. But even the presence of tons of guns couldn’t make anyone believe that this man had anything to fight back with when facing the creature after the inhabitant of his village. That contrast between being sure of oneself and being ready for what may come next creates the fun. Well, here come the extraterrestrials, and it’s time to have a chat. It’s said that Hope is the priciest movie that’s been produced in South Korea, costing around 46 to 74 million dollars; still, this amount is peanuts compared to the cost of the average Hollywood movie, so you shouldn’t be expecting Avatar. It is a bit of a surprise to see that while the real places, stunts, and explosions are all very real and expensive, the aliens seem to belong to an old video game. They look like humans but move as if the animators were inspired by their faces and did anything whatever when drawing their bodies. After the alien passes away, the effects crew continues to display its corpse as a more realistic prop than it was alive. The alien finally appears in its most believable form when it transforms into a non-human creature. True, Fassbender is in it, as well as Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell, and when the roles of the actors become clear, the casting becomes even more hilarious than the jokes of the movie itself. It’s a lesson that I try to learn in every review I write: casting a popular actor doesn’t mean that the role is meaningful, and Hope does confuse the presence with the purpose from time to time. Well, to be honest, this movie has some real funny moments, too. An old guy, played by Im Hyun-sik, keeps on talking about finding aliens while suffering from a bad stomachache, and the audience, including myself, laughed like it was a stand-up comedy show. A surgeon uses a chainsaw to do an operation when the usual tools don’t work – that’s a joke one can’t miss! I can assume that Na wanted to mock blockbusters and their absurd nature through his film. The only way to reconcile with his ending is to see it that way. The more crucial problem? Structure. The movie diverts from Bum-seok to focus on local hero Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), who leads his buddies into battle to deal with the situation, while another hunting crew joins in the fun just so the film can show us what it’s like to shoot a gun off a horse. This is fun and games, but it also takes away from the movie’s real protagonist: Sung-ae (Hoyeon), who is supposed to be the heartbeat of the flick, but instead of dragging everyone back together, ends up becoming sidelined completely. The town’s self-proclaimed guru Mr. Hae-sul and one-off character Yang-bae also face a similar fate and thus end up becoming irrelevant. This means that the concept of depth has different interpretations, and only some of the characters receive it. One unique idea of the film, stating that the real jungle is people, is exposed in the dialogues of the film, making the whole concept lifeless and predictable. So what’s next? The sequel part made no sense because the setup was so last minute, it felt like an afterthought. But it doesn’t. Two and a half hours seems to go overboard, and suggesting there is more story is frankly kind of frustrating because I question whether this movie can stand on its own. So where does that leave me? I’m honestly torn. Na accomplishes car chases and horseback chases better than almost everybody else out there. The DOP Hong Kyung-pyo, who filmed The Wailing, makes sure each frame is beautiful, with gorgeous light and forests with animals that are moving so fast that they are hard to notice. The production design is always beautiful, and the creature effects look like they were made in the previous decade. Imagine the stuff in Annihilation happening to the heroes of Shaun of the Dead. Hope is basically that. It’s fun unless you start thinking about it. I still cannot tell if I enjoyed a great film or witnessed a bad movie that was too disappointing. In any case, I believe the sequel will be worth the wait.

OUR REVIEW – A CONFLICTING 5