Korea’s Most Expensive Movie Ever Opens a Pandora’s Box

Hope, the sci-fi action thriller from South Korean director Na Hong-jin, starts as one sort of movie, turns into another, swerves back toward its original premise, and then gradually mutates into something completely else, as though you, as a viewer, had suddenly tuned into a long-running anime series in the middle of episode 57. Na expects you to understand what’s going on at all times, but none of it makes any sense. It’s also very noisy.

The movie begins with a police chief, whose name, as far as I can discern, is “Chief,” coming upon a gored bull in the middle of a rural road. It’s a grim, bloody, effective noir-ish detective opening. Some of Chief’s associates wander off into the forest to investigate further. The chief drives back to town, Hope Harbor, which appears to be on the North Korean border, giving us hope that the film that follows will be a metaphor for DMZ-related border tensions. There are a few hints of that here and there, but mundane geopolitical reality doesn’t really appear to be Na’s concern.

Instead, what follows is a near hour-long escalation sequence as an unnamed, unseen force gradually destroys Hope Harbor. An increasingly distraught Chief becomes a true believer in the menace as he sees cars and limbs fly, buildings shatter, things explode, and the streets run red with fake blood. Eventually, we see the monster itself, a hideous pale-green colossus that’s having the worst hair day imaginable.

Hope ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Na Hong-Jin
Written by: Na Hong-Jin
Starring: Hwang Jung-min, Hoyeon, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander
Running time: 160 mins

This sequence is by far the film’s best section, and one of the best sections in any film of any genre this year. It doesn’t relent, it unspools its revelations slowly. When the action hits, it hits with a violent hammer.

From there, however, the movie begins to dissolve into pure insane nonsense. First, it treats us to a long aftermath scene where an elderly wild ginseng forager tells an extremely scatological story about encountering more of these monsters in the woods. He narrates his tale in such a way that shows that, if nothing else, Na has read a lot of Quentin Tarantino screenplays. Then there’s an extremely bizarre autopsy scene that an older female doctor conducts with a chainsaw. It wouldn’t be out of place in a Troma film.

From that point, we go back to the forest, lest we forget the film left half its characters there nearly 90 minutes earlier, and then the movie really starts to decay, slowly at first, then totally. It turns out these aren’t monsters. They’re aliens. And they came in a spaceship. Also, Na has heavily and obviously CGI’ed them into the film, and besides that, they bear the likenesses, if you squint hard enough, of Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander.

What in the Sam Hill is going on here, I wondered, more than once. The forest scenes contain quite a bit more action, some of it quite exciting, even though it’s impossible to discern exactly what’s going on, or why. Na mixes in broad character comedy, a lot of shouting, and an overbearing score that knocked my fillings loose. No one could ever accuse him of either a subtle touch or a lack of enthusiasm.

An extended, absurd, but admittedly thrilling and hilarious car chase ensues, which also somehow involves a machine-gun toting man riding a horse. This is why we go to the movies. However, we don’t go to the movies for the final 15 minutes of Hope, which suddenly decide to focus instead on the bad guy monsters, who apparently are actually good guy aliens on a quest. The hapless, hunted Korean villagers, who we just watched scream bloody murder for two hours, cease to matter entirely.

The cosmology baffles, the CGI acting is horrible. If the movie’s kinetic first hour seems like it’s from another project entirely, well, that’s because Hope is nearly three hours long. We thought we were getting Predator, and instead we got Avatar. But clearly, far as Na is concerned, both are good, so why not both?