Heck of a wild, sometimes insane, ride with, in the stunt work, shades of Indiana Jones. But its length is a drawback. And that’s a shame because even I with no cinematic editing skills could see how easily it would be to trim 20-25 minutes from its unwieldy running time. There’s too many characters for a start, too much unnecessarily exposition and I’d chuck out wholesale all the business at the end of anything falling from the sky. And while we’re at it, I’d add one word to the title. Hope Harbour, where the action is set, is more prosaic and honest than Hope which carries pretentious symbolic and metaphysical undertones.
Part of what makes this so much fun is both the characters and the lack of characters. No scientists fill us full of mumbo-jumbo and no interfering pompous government officials get in the way of this narrative. The local inhabitants are, on the whole, gleefully gung-ho. Let’s show this critter, appears to be their watchword, as amateur hunters and a vengeful junior cop plan to show the invaders who’s boss. All the characters, that is, except for police chief Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min) who spends most of the time crapping in his pants.
But it’s the action and mystery we’ve come for and this doesn’t disappoint. After discovering some creature has wrecked the town, the chief tries to hunt it down, only to find the roles are reversed and this scampering alien terror, even faster than a Ridley Scott alien, is coming after him. Having, between them, rendered the town a complete shambles, the action shifts to the forest where a small family of aliens has made their home.
Headstrong and to a large extent dumb hunters just fancy a more interesting trophy than a tiger and set off in hot pursuit, some on horseback. Rookie officer Sung Ae (Hoyeon) is the pick of the vengeful forces, having raided the armory for topline weapons including a grenade launcher.
Usually, by now, the place would be swarming with militia, helicopters, airplanes, thousands of crack troops armed to the gills, but all the help the cop can call on are all away dealing with wildfires. It takes a while to untangle the mystery. The aliens are anatomically related to humans but have a tendency to sprout antlers and maybe even turn themselves into trees though trees are hardyl safe when they’re around, any hunters they collect are liable to be sent hurtling straight through a tree by the force of their throw.
A child alien has gone missing and turns up dead in the freezer of a numbskull who killed it with the aim of selling it to the highest black market bidder. The police chief has detected anguish in the monster ripping the town apart and he reckons the alien is a mother searching for the lost child. The other two aliens are mistress and obedient servant.
The aliens are not just hard to kill but don’t observe the rules of the road thus triggering a mad chase that also involves a hunter on horseback who tries to do one of those action tropes of jumping from some thing moving very fast, in this case a horse, to something moving as fast, a cop car.
There are none of the traditional character cliches you usually find in the genre. No power struggle, no romance, unspoken or otherwise, no considering the fate of the universe, no deep thinking. In fact, like the new-look Resident Evil the characters are distinguished, if that’s the word, by being all too human, with frailties exaggerated in the heat of battle. They spend all their time annoying each other or arguing.
I’m not familiar with the work of Korean writer-director-producer (that level of control probably the reason why it’s overlong) Na Hong-jin who’s hardly prolific given his previous picture The Wailing was a decade ago. But this is certainly worth the wait. The set-up is imaginative, the narrative inventive, the characters appealing and once it gets going a pure pedal-to-the-metal actioner.
Foolishly, this has been sold via the arthouse festival vibe which will put off the audience of action fans it is aiming for. Catch it while you can because it won’t last long in cinemas and the action will be depleted on the smaller screen.
Well worth seeing.
