Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Na Hong-jin
Starring: Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Jung Ho-yeon, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender
Hope is by no means the first sci-fi movie to explore the idea of a small town populated by rubes becoming ground zero for an alien invasion, but I've never seen that premise pulled off in this manner. The setup usually calls for slow burn storytelling, but despite working with a running time of 156 minutes, writer/director Na Hong-jin believes he has no time to waste. Hong-jin's take on this well-worn concept is an all-out action extravaganza, and the action kicks in before many tardy cinemagoers will have taken their seats.
The title is also the name of Hope's setting, a small South Korean harbour village not too far from the border with North Korea. As such, the locals have long prepared for invasion, each resident seemingly possessing an arsenal of weaponry to rival the average Jason Statham character. The village is filled with signs urging the populace to keep an eye out for spies and intruders.
Intruders arrive in the form of a quartet of aliens (played, intriguingly, by western actors Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton, a sign of Korean media's growing global clout). The first clue is a mutilated cow, which the local bumpkins believe is the work of a tiger hiding out in the nearby woods after making its way from Siberia. Bedraggled police chief Bum-Seok (Hwang Jung-min) dispatches a group of vigilantes to the forest while he heads back into town. There he finds a scene of destruction, buildings torn apart and corpses strewn through the streets.
It's at this point, a mere 15 minutes or so into the movie, that Hope kicks off the sort of over the top action set-piece that would usually be reserved for a climax. The filmmaking is exquisite, with Hong-jin drawing from the Spielberg playbook as he holds back on revealing the alien until the sequence ends close to an hour later. We see the creature's handy work in the hollowed out buildings through which Bum-Seok cautiously makes his way, and we hear explosions, gunfire and an unearthly roar in the distance. Things ramp up when Bum-Seok is joined by his all-action young deputy Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), a machine-gun-toting badass who seems to have been parachuted in from a James Cameron movie. There is a car chase filmed in exhilarating fashion to rival the work of George Miller. It's an action junkie's dream.
Once the aliens are revealed however, you fully appreciate why Hong-jin kept them hidden for so long. Hope is Korea's most expensive production to date, but its budget is still little more than $30 million, and little of that budget seems to have been allocated to the digital FX department. The aliens are as shoddy CG renderings as you'll see in the average SyFy channel production. It doesn't help that they all look so inconsistent that it's difficult to believe they're a collective race or species. The CG obfuscates the mo-cap performances to such a degree that Fessbender and Vikander make minimal contributions.
The script is equally shoddy. Hope is essentially two hour-long action set-pieces with a half hour of exposition sandwiched in between. Even that middle portion, when the action slows down and characters try to explain the plot, does little to flesh out Hope's flimsy premise. At best, the characters are archetypes like the out of his depth police chief and the eager rookie, while at worst they're indistinguishable from each other, like the various vigilantes who come into play. There isn't a specific character to latch onto here, nobody for us to invest in emotionally. In a movie almost three hours long, this becomes a significant issue by the second half.
That second half introduces another extended set-piece, one inspired by the Mad Max movies. It's technically brilliant, but as we don't particularly care about any of the people involved it just doesn't have the sort of impact it should have. The ending hints at a sequel, and the Korean box office performance suggests we'll get one, but any follow-up needs to give us some substance to add weight to its set-pieces.
Hope is in UK/ROI cinemas from September 25th.
