Don Lee Fights a Crocodile

Based on the webtoon Pleasant Bullying, Concrete Utopia from South Korea posited a mundane apocalypse, just an overly destructive earthquake, and told the story of how one Seoul apartment complex survived destruction by the sheer dumb luck of random geography. But in a bizarre twist of production and distribution, the sequel to Concrete Utopia, Badland Hunters, came out on Netflix on Januay 27^th, the very same day that Concrete Utopia finally made its own international streaming debut on Rakuten Viki.

The very existence of Badland Hunters is puzzling in a lot of ways. The film went into production before they even released Concrete Utopia. Lead star Don Lee apparently just really liked the setting, and led an effort to pitch the project to Netflix with a little help from one of his favorite martial arts choreographers Heo Myung-haeng in the director’s chair, and the original  cartoonist behind and Netflix screenwriter for the military police series D.P. on the script.

While popular and lauded in its home country, Concrete Utopia attracted little interest from its December 8^th theatrical release in the United States, and the social commentary film failed to make this year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar shortlist. Much as the Concrete Utopia film left behind its comic source material, so too has Badland Hunters left Concrete Utopia behind. The connection to the original film is so vague that Netflix didn’t even bother to pick up the Concrete Utopia streaming rights themselves. There’s a lot to like about the premise of Concrete Utopia, the fourth highest grossing film in South Korea last year. The residents of the still-standing apartment complex in functionally post-apocalyptic Seoul abortively try to survive in the new world by reasserting the social structures of the old one- a doomed effort, if only because scavenging supplies from the old world can only last so long.

Badland Hunters seemed doomed to comparable obscurity, given that Netflix made no apparent effort to promote it. January dossiers from Netflix made no mention of the movie in part because Badland Hunters didn’t even have a confirmed release date until a week into the New Year. And while Badland Hunters is the current most popular Netflix film, this comes with the usual caveat that it’s not especially popular in the United States, only going as high as fourth place on the strength of algorithmic recommendations and the lack of other priority Netflix content. None of the top three films in the United States are even from the last five months.

Badland Hunters is the first breakthrough South Korean project in quite some time, despite these weaknesses, as belated coverage of the poorly advertised film now spreads across the Internet. The lessons involved are more grim than not, and I don’t mean that in the sense that Concrete Utopia is a grim tale of society persisting through inertia, with the slow collapse of the social contract being the bigger disaster than the massive earthquake. Badland Hunters is a very silly movie by contrast.

Within the first few shots we see mutant geckos and then the mad doctor using them to try and save his daughter. The earthquake interrupts that, but ultimately the question of why South Korea has turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland really isn’t that important. The special effects budget doesn’t render the earthquake at all, and you could easily remove the few scenes that reference the earthquake from the movie without any negative impact on understanding the larger story.

Which is, to be clear, mostly about what the mad doctor has been doing with the mutant geckos, and how he somehow talked a full military relief team into becoming his own personal cult, with the society built around this cult somehow oblivious to the fact that he’s doing evil experiments. Technically these are all spoilers but I can’t imagine anyone actually watching the movie would be at all surprised by any of these developments. The whole premise is for Don Lee to go around doing cool action stuff, and after the crocodile, and the underwhelming gangsters, the well-dressed attaché promising a local girl a better life with clean water is about all that remains for him to punch.

To the extent that Badland Hunters is a success at all it’s a remarkably cynical one. Take away all the nuance and social commentary of Concrete Utopia, add in a bunch of silly worldbuilding and hardcore action, and this is what you’ve got. If Concrete Utopia is the kind of sophisticated yet accessible film that the traditional South Korean film production system can make every so often, Badland Hunters is the kind of project Netflix just greenlights on reflex, not seeming to know or care anything about the underlying appeal. Even now Netflix is more focused on next month’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender remake than anything coming out in the interim.

Of course, the fault doesn’t all lie with Netflix. This actually isn’t even the first time the South Korean film industry has made a sort-of-sequel to a film that hasn’t actually come out yet. Train to Busan was another such project, based on the same general zombie premise as Seoul Station from the same director, Yeon Sang-ho. Train to Busan is far from a bad movie- goodness knows it has its fair share of social class commentary even as it, too, manages to sneak in scenes of Don Lee getting into fistfights with mutant cops. Seoul Station is just an indisputedly sharper criticism, making homeless people with no health insurance and teenage runaways our perspective characters instead of more well-to-do working folks, marking the origins of the zombie apocalypse as being of malicious human neglect rather than nature’s vengeance.

Still, that’s a discouraging progression we’ve come to over the last eight years. From Train to Busan to Badland Hunters, the superior progenitors to both simply wallowing in obscurity since access alone doesn’t determine success. Distribution and marketing remain more important than anyone wants to admit. But hey, I don’t judge, if you read all this and your only takeaway was wow, in Badland Hunters Don Lee fights a crocodile? Go ahead and watch it. I’m not trying to spoil your fun.