Hope is a shock-and-awe monster rampage stretched to a monstrous 160-minute runtime, and that might be all you could ask for.
The set pieces are stunning: vehicles and debris flung around like toys, torrents of gunfire raking creatures that simply will not die, storefronts ripped open and streets buried in rubble, all captured in tracking shots so fluid it’s hard to say how anyone pulled them off.
The monsters themselves are nothing special to look at, but in motion, they rip.
The carnage splits across two locales: first a small rural town, where the hunt plays out like urban warfare among mom-and-pop shops and narrow alleys, and later a deep primeval forest that gives way to a full-throttle, Mad Max-style highway chase.
Cranked to the point of madness and shot with dazzling precision by Parasite cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, the spectacle alone is worth the trip to the theatre.
It also proves a point: Hand Korean filmmakers a big enough budget, and they can stage Hollywood-level carnage with style to spare – a kimchi creature blockbuster, if you will.
All of which is to say that the story never enters into it. Hope barely bothers with setup, and the scene-setting it does provide is purely for vibes. The film runs on fever-dream logic, its world only loosely acquainted with the havoc unfolding inside it.
As best one can tell, it’s set in the 1980s, in a small harbour town near the Demilitarized Zone, but it could be almost anywhere.
A cow is found slaughtered on a country road. Police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) shows up in a kitschy visor cap and black leather jacket, while Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) and his hunting buddies come along like drifters who wandered in from a revisionist Western.
Soon enough, the town starts coming apart: bodies in the streets, buildings with holes torn clean through them, debris sailing overhead to a feral howl. Bum-seok, hopelessly out of his depth, falls in with locals who apparently already know about the monsters and turn up armed to the teeth.
When the creature finally has Bum-seok cornered, Hoyeon’s steely rookie officer pulls up with a squad car somehow full of heavy weaponry. It’s that kind of movie.
The characters more or less get the same perfunctory treatment. Na grants them barely any interiority, and even less competence.
Bum-seok spends the movie panicked and overwhelmed – first by terror, then by a baffling compassion toward the very creature he’s chasing.
Sung-ki has the swagger of an action hero and none of the nerve; the monster tosses him around like a rag doll, and his only reliable virtue is his cartoonish inability to die.
And then there are the aliens, who arguably have it worst. Performed through motion and facial capture by Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander (with Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton), they’ve apparently come to Earth with cosmic stakes on the line – only to be harassed at every turn before spending the film’s inscrutable final minutes solemnly reciting mock-profound gibberish with zero worldbuilding behind any of it.
So Hope has the budget and scale of a four-quadrant tentpole and almost none of the machinery. The longer it runs, the more the mayhem starts to feel like one long practical joke, almost as if the blockbuster is Na’s medium for trolling.
Is Hope meant as a send-up of Hollywood’s bloated sci-fi assembly line? Are the incongruities deliberate, or seams left by a notoriously protracted production?
No one can tell for sure, but what seems certain is that Na has managed to fold the enigmatic pull of The Wailing into the pulpiest doomsday blockbuster imaginable.
A decade of waiting, a record budget and, at the centre of it all, a work that refuses to explain itself – somehow, it all feels strangely right. – The Korea Herald/Asia News Network
Summary:
Weird kimchi blockbuster
