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The marketing for Hope, the new film by the South Korean horror master Na Hong-jin, presents it on an epic, otherworldly scale. It’s the most expensive Korean movie ever made, and the director’s first in more than 10 years, since his widely acclaimed hit, The Wailing; its sweeping rollout across the United States, which includes special showings on premium-format screens, is also one rarely afforded to international productions. That approach befits Hope’s run time (a hefty 156 minutes); its blockbuster plot, about an alien invasion taking place near Korea’s Demilitarized Zone; and its open-endedness—apparently, Na has already written a sequel. Yet the entire time I was watching it, I had one overriding feeling: Everything could perhaps be a little bit smaller.
Hope’s first hour, after all, does not really hint at these greater ambitions. It comes across as simply an extremely robust monster thriller, mixing action, horror, and comedy with aplomb. The story initially concerns a slightly bumbling police officer, Bum-seok (played by Hwang Jung-min), who is summoned by local hunters to investigate a cow carcass covered in mysterious claw marks. Bum-seok’s fears of an escaped zoo animal escalate as he returns to the town of Hope Harbor to find that carnage has erupted. Na has the camera (and his anxious protagonist) navigate piled-up vehicles and trashed houses with jumpy timidity, building tension beautifully as Bum-seok tries to figure out exactly what could have caused such destruction.
Through all of the early action, I was most reminded of solid creature features such as Tremors, Eight Legged Freaks, and Crawl—the kind of delightful Hollywood pablum we don’t get enough of anymore. Entries in this genre tend to pose the question of what would happen if a few oversize monsters trashed a town with impunity. Another obvious influence is Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, which is more of a major-disaster flick; it features a massive tentacled kaiju while also playing on fears of blundering bureaucracy and capitalistic overreach—subjects common in Korean cinema. Hope has similar fun poking at local law enforcement’s shambling initial response to catastrophe: The townspeople (many of them retirement-age) take their defense upon themselves and drive around in pickup trucks holding shotguns.
But as with any movie of this ilk, the buildup is often more fun than the reveal, and Hope begins to falter as we see more of the beings terrorizing the land. Recent reports put its budget at nearly $75 million, which is a considerable amount for the South Korean film industry, but is still on the lower end for a project this ambitious. As the action drags on and on, it becomes clear just how grand Na’s vision is; slow-motion gunplay unfolds in sequence after sequence, where the embattled cops shoot at the CGI-rendered creatures besieging them, and the digital imagery can’t quite keep up with the otherwise crisp visuals. I am perfectly willing to overlook some of those limitations—I applaud Na’s big swing—but the director might have benefited from pulling back on the garishly low-resolution monster effects and leaving more to the imagination.
Alas, he did not. The audience is instead treated to bipedal invaders drawn from motion-capture performances by Hollywood stars, including Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. The script nods to a wider universe of stories that will establish how the aliens showed up and what their plans are for our planet. But Hope itself explains very little, a somewhat shocking turn of events given its immense length. Around the hundredth time that I watched townspeople fire machine guns at half speed in a striking landscape (much of the film’s second half takes place in a beautiful, forested area with very tall trees), I realized that a broader exposition probably wasn’t forthcoming.
Hope doesn’t have much of an ending at all, choosing to nod toward a potential future installment. The decision is frustrating; several of Na’s teases about the movie’s world are intriguing, but a punchless third act could turn off audiences—and thus cost him the opportunity to depict it further. The director’s skill with action filmmaking and the highs of the tensest set pieces should have been enough to excite me for a sequel, if Na does succeed in getting one produced. But after throwing some thrilling opening haymakers, Hope doesn’t offer enough to really encourage me back.
