2026, Na Hong-jin (The Wailing) -- download
Wow, two-thirds of that movie were incredible. But, likely a Purple Suit yelled, "Give us a franchise !" and suddenly the movie shifted tones faster than getting hit by a sign-post when your upper torso is hanging out of a car.
Walk it off buddy, walk it off.
Hope Harbour, South Korea, somewhere near the North Korean border. Police Chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, The Wailing) is brought by some local hunters whom I will call "the boys", to look at the mauled corpse of a cow sitting in the middle of a road. Everyone has an idea of what could have done it, but they all agree it must have been a tiger that came from North Korea, bypassing all the barb wired fences and landmines. The hunters assure the cop that if their friend said he saw a tiger, it was a tiger. They are fucking with him. He's a bit of a joke, wearing the shiny leather jacket and the aviator glasses trying to intimidate the hunters about their obviously illegal guns. He heads back to town, and they head off to see if they can follow the trail of ... whatever killed the cow.
I was always under the impression that South Korea had very limited access to guns, but there are a LOT of guns in this movie, enough that their appearance are constantly surprising Ko, and enough that this would surprise an American bumpkin cop. Like, there are a lot of automatic weapons, which in this case, is a good thing. Kind of.
Immediately upon arriving in town he hears gunshots and explosions and a roar. And thus begins the first hour, the first act, of this movie, which is completely bonkers and completely tight. A monster is raging through the town, a big troll-like, green skinned thing with long limbs and scraggly hair. Ko starts hunting it, seeing only the evidence of its rampage in the wreckage, dead bodies and destroyed buildings. Na does a brilliant job of lightening the absolute horror of this non-stop battle through Ko's reaction, a mixture of bravery and abject fear, and the dismissive reaction every other villager has towards him -- while he hesitantly goes forward, the rest just wade into the fray (with their tons of big guns, of course) despite everyone being crushed around them. And there is the fact that the monster is a bullet sponge, nothing even seemingly inconveniencing it. That is, until ultra-capable officer Im Sung-ae (Hoyeon, Squid Game) appears on the scene, with her tiny figure, incredible driving skills and a backseat full of... yes, automatic weapons. She blows one leg off the creature, but that doesn't stop it, but it does put it on the run. And that run ends with it being smeared on the highway by a large tanker truck.
MEANWHILE.
The boys are in the woods hunting "the" creature down, which started at the cow farm, where there are more dead cows, and the farmer himself, and ends at .... well, a fucking spaceship. This is where the movie pivots from being.... well, full of questions as to what the monster is (angry spirit? an actual troll? supernatural?) to, "OK, aliens have arrived and they are fucking terrifying." The arrival of the boys is offset by another bunch of very capable, very well equipped (again, and we are not surprised) hunters, mounted on horseback. Money and status is implied.
This is act two, and involves the boys fighting, and dying, at the hands of a diverse group of aliens: a spiky one, a dog-like one, a giant one, a smaller lithe one. This act is propulsive and deadly but ends up with only Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung, Humint) surviving, the second-cousin of the cop, and the more sobre, attentive (and still alive) one of the hunters. He was the one who involved Chief Ko. Of the aliens, the scariest one is the dog-like one, whiiiiich turns out to be the giant one -- he has two forms, one more civilized and intelligent looking (he has a face) and the other has a giant maw and walks/runs on all fours.
Act three. More of the same -- run away from the dog-like one, and Sung-ki survives the initial onslaught only to reconnect with his cousin, and the young officer Im, and THEY have connected with a doofus who found, and killed, what is obviously a child-alien. You see, while Sung-ki was running / riding a horse masterfully, from the dog-like alien, the others, in town, having killed the troll-like monster and recovered a bit, worked with a coroner to crack open the troll. Very alien like; organs unlike anything on Earth. And the doofus tells them he killed one; shot it in the head. That's when Chief Ko is convinced there have to be more and ... well, maybe they aren't as indiscriminately violent as he originally assumed. So, he gathers them up to find out where the doofus found the child, and that happens to be ... where Sung-ki is escaping; they all connect together for the Act Three chase.
This final act is both exciting and... consternating. And a bit, as Kent said, tedious. Running running running, exploding that does little damage, running, and when I say running, I mean driving at top speed along a highway system in the forested hills. They must go pretty far from Hope itself. It all culminates in them finally killing the dog-like alien, and get a brief moment to praise Sung-ki, who is hanging out of the cop car, when.... BLANG !! Yep, he's hit by a road sign because doofus swerved too close to the edge of the road. Courageous and capable Sung-ki goes SPLAT.
But wait, the "wait, what?" is not over yet. In the background, we see a spaceship burning its way through the clouds, far off in the distance, to crash into a mountainside. KABOOM. Shockwaves. And then we get to "meet" the aliens. Dog-like Giant, who has not died, is a protector of the Spiky Her Majesty and their son (maybe??), the lithe one. They know their/a child has been killed, and the Emperor has died, along with their people, with the crash of the spaceship. But Dog-like (and the now present subtitled alien language gives them names, and a topic of conversation) offers up his heart, which will heal the dead child.
The End -- The Cliffhanger that generated a WTF that rung out round the world.
Seriously, we had such an exciting, ultra-violent, yet actually funny, good start. Monsters, guns, destruction, chases, senior citizens with automatic weapons! So much is had in that first hour! And then a Purple Suit shows up with, "But what if they were aliens ?!?!?!"
P.S. Mid-credits we learn that Sung-ki did indeed walk it off.
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