Rarely has an action movie taken its time to ratchet up tension in more or less real time like Na Hong-jin’s Hope, which is the most expensive movie in Korean film history, according to reports. Ostensibly an aliens-versus-humans adventure, Na holds back on showing us much for what seems like a full hour or more of its 160-minute runtime. But in addition to breathless action and brutal violence, and some admittedly not-state-of-the-art CGI, we get an allegory for the line between protecting your people and attacking “the other.”
Na Hong-jin’s previous films are among my favorite South Korean genre films of the past several years. And all quite varied. The Chaser from 2008 is a taut serial killer thriller; The Yellow Sea from 2010 is a crime-action movie; and my favorite, 2016’s The Wailing, is a slow and brooding folk horror under the guise of police procedural. All three films prior to Hope explore deeper themes and an expansive roster of characters while giving you the thrills and chills you want.
Hope, in addition to being the most expensive and most special effects-filled of Na’s movies, it also, oddly, has the simplest premise, the shallowest characters, and a plot that takes way, way too long to show itself. I also would have loved to know beforehand that Hope is merely a chapter one of the story, with a sudden shift in circumstances at the end coming almost entirely out of left field (or left sky). However, it also offers two or three of the most intense, edge-of-your-seat action sequences I’ve seen in any movie this year.
The movie’s biggest strength is its deliberate pace and specific setting. The action takes place in and around a small fishing village in the Demilitarized Zone between South and North Korea. We see signs posted around the border fences to watch out for infiltrators. We then find the chief of police (Hwang Jung-min) and a local union hunter (Zo In-sung) along with a group of other hunters looking at a cow that died from significant claw marks. Is it a bear? Is it a tiger that made its way down from Siberia? Nobody quite knows.
The hunters head into the woods where they find more dead animals and destroyed campsites. The Chief drives back into town and sees a massive hole in a building. For the next what feels like an hour of runtime (not a bad thing!), the Chief drives or runs around the narrow streets of the village, just missing the horror of this monster tearing up buildings, cars, and people. He comes across various groups of other civilians (most of whom have automatic weapons without a permit, a fun running joke) only for them to face something offscreen which kills them horribly.
When we finally see the creature—the huge, near-human-looking beast—a chase begins which only ramps up when Officer Yim (Squid Game‘s Hoyeon) speeds through in a police car and opens fire with an assault rifle. I cannot think of a cooler introduction to a character. It’s a chef’s kiss moment. But, despite this creature killing dozens of people, the Chief, just for a moment, sees fear and sadness in its face…why?
This becomes a major thrust of the second half of the movie. What is this thing? Where does it come from? And why does it look almost-human? While patching up the community, the police and the hunters separately learn the woods harbor more such creatures, and that they are not from this planet.
Hope very pointedly places the threat of the extraterrestrials within the framework of refugees, and not realizing the difference until it’s perhaps too late. At what point does defending yourself look like attacking others? A community living in constant fear and vigilance of infiltrators from across the border, ready to defend itself with big ol’ guns, would perhaps not recognize a misunderstanding when they see it.
While the themes are there, I do think Hope‘s allegories work better in retrospect. After the credits start to roll, you go “Oh, I see what they were doing.” In the moment, it’s a monster movie with some fantastic car chases. The final set piece, which sees an alien (mo-capped Michael Fassbender, no less) chasing down one of our heroes and his horse and the others in a police car, has a relentless pace and made me long for “simple” action scenes like this in American blockbusters.
I confess I was more annoyed at the set-up for a sequel than exhilarated. I think it reads less like a story that needs another chapter and more like purposely delaying any plot development until it was already too late to wrap up. The movie is, as I said, 160 minutes, most of that these boots-on-the-ground, quite relatable sequences of people trying not to die. These are excellent, I wouldn’t change anything about them. But I do think, for a movie nearly three hours long, it could have woven more story into the runtime so it didn’t feel like Basil Exposition in an alien language.
Hope is relentless action, compelling performances, and superb filmmaking. It’s also got quite ropey CGI monsters that wouldn’t jar as much did they not become full-fledged characters by the end. Extended scenes work very well, but as a whole the movie feels incomplete. Still wholly worth watching, but I’m not dying for more..