3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Great Flood

2025, Byung-woo Kim (Reborn) -- Netflix

South Korea has the world's lowest birth rate, caused primarily by a change in focus from marriage & family to careers & personal growth. Support for women doing both is almost non-existent, and that combined with traditional value systems is forcing more women to delay having children. These are stats drawn from a brief scan of the topic, which of course is expected to be biased in one way or another. But of course, there is always a kernel of truth to it, and pop culture will reflect what society is thinking. Eye-Eee, movies reflect what is going on in the culture.

This movie displays as a disaster movie, the ending of the world as an asteroid strikes Antarctica and almost instantly melts the ice shield, raising the ocean levels within hours, tsunamis ending human life as we know it. There is a toss away comment about the world governments knowing, but doing nothing as there was nothing to be done. Our main character, Koo An Na (Kim Da-mi, The Witch: Pt 1 - The Subversion), lives in a cramped apartment complex, a widowed mother of a single child, and as the flood happens, she is racing to get the boy to the tower roof. A government agent appears, there to assist her, as her job is important and a helicopter awaits them on the roof. Challenges abound, from panicking people to has explosions to the crashing tsunami.

And then she dies.

And then it starts over again.

From here on in, spoilers abound.

And no, not a time loop movie, but it does bear resemblance to the genre. Of course, we know something hinky is going on here, but we don't know what, but the movie has very decisively slipped away from the disaster to the ... iterations. Yes, more than one, MANY more than one. And along the way we get insights into An Na's job and her ... son, and her life choices. By the time we are deep in the repetitive flow of An Na trying to, unsuccessfully, reach the top of the apartment tower, we know we must be in a simulation, because how else could the same disastrous events keep happening and happening over and over again. But things are changing, such as discovering the boy is ... not a boy. He is an... artificial life form? An Na was part of a government program working on the emotional construct housed in a jar grown body. The entire movie focuses on the emotional component, and to that, on the relationship between a mother and her son. As iterations pass, the boy in the simulation has become aware he is not real but still throws a very child like tantrum, running from his "mother". And she has become desperate to find him, again and again, so they can reach the top of the tower and "escape".

This is where the movie lost its integrity, as it wants to be a speculative scifi movie about the idea humanity's last hope hinging on whether a mother will abandon all sense of self for the safety of her son, but it loses its own threads in the scifi behind it. If this is all a simulation, why does it matter if their is an artificial boy becoming self aware? I mean, he's not a construct but just a factor in the simulation. I get it is meant to further the goal of making the perfect, self-sacrificing mother, to be mythical mother to a new next-evolutionary-step artificial human race, to come back and re-colonize an abandoned, watery Earth, but then why even have the plot point of the boy becoming aware? If the idea is to enforce that an Artificial Mommy will protect her Artificial Son, then the only important part is the Simulated Mother. Also, once she knows its all a simulation, and is making all her choices based on that knowledge (Hell, she has 21,314 printed on her tshirt, showing how long they've been at it) of being simulated, doesn't that taint the results? 

Like other lofty scifi movies, they often lose themselves in their agenda and end up shoe-horning in the speculative elements to just let the desired point come through. The whole movie seems to be screaming out loud, "The human race will just end unless women remember that being a mother is the most important job on the planet !!!" ? Everything else is just tacked on for disaster-y, scifi-y and emotional-ly brownie points.

Oh yes, as for the "disaster movie", the parts we do get, the expanded locked room, in that the movie takes entirely in the stair wells and the cramped apartments and the watery depths of a drowning world, it was incredibly... visceral? A Korean movie about an apartment tower cannot help but comment on the cultural construct of villages transposed to apartments.

While watching this movie, part of my brain harkened back to Hollywood-ish takes on the idea of artificial life forms vs motherhood, in Mother/Android and I Am Mother, both of which went the other direction, in that they have a plot point ("motherhood is good!") but were dazzled by their own scifi. Their "agendas" are less at play, but they are all in the same place, a focus on the power of motherhood.