Na Hong-jin’s Hope is a rarity, a big-budget spectacle that’s genuinely, endearingly loopy. At a time when so much American studio filmmaking — even the good stuff — is affable, speed-tested gadgetry, here’s a ragtag Korean epic that throws everything at the screen and breaks right through it.
When it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, Hope sharply divided audiences and critics. It will continue to do so. Some have called it a masterwork, others a lumbering disaster. I don’t think it’s either, but sometimes you admire a movie for the brazenness of its vision and go along for the ride. It isn’t tidy. It isn’t well-behaved. It’s not often we get a film of this size and scope that inspires such strong responses in both directions.
This is a monster movie that rarely stops moving. The action is relentless, the characters are types and the comedy is broad. Most of the critical negativity has concerned its special effects, but I don’t know, they looked fine to me. The film’s creatures have the wonderfully herky-jerky quality of Ray Harryhausen’s old stop-motion effects. They’re not sleek and featureless; they have personality and spontaneity, and Na makes the bold choice to film them in bright, crisp daylight.
He sets the film over a single day in a sleepy South Korean village called Hope Harbor. It’s near the border of North Korea, and the town has banners with such slogans as “protect the nation from infiltration.” But they surely weren’t anticipating this kind of infiltration: a 10-foot-tall beast that can run on all fours and looks like a cross between James Cameron’s Na’vi and Goya’s depiction of Saturn devouring his children.
The creature is pure aggression. It only wants to destroy. It crashes through buildings, swipes at parked cars and crushes defensive townspeople, and there are even more mysterious beings on the edge of town.
Hope runs nearly two hours and 40 minutes and is bookended by two of the longest, most delightfully unhinged action sequences I’ve seen in a while. For the first hour, it’s a town-under-siege movie; for the last, an extended chase across mountains, through forests and along a twisty, deserted highway. In between, it stops to catch its breath and introduce its characters, including an overwhelmed police chief, a jaded old-timer, a vengeful cop, amateur hunters, militiamen on horseback and the town dunce, who claims to have an alien corpse in his freezer.
It might sound like I’m defending Hope rather than praising it, but it’s impossible to overlook its flaws. Is the ending initially confusing? Yes. Do I think the movie could have been tighter? Possibly. Would I have preferred less CGI? Maybe. Would I have liked it more were it way more disciplined? Definitely not.
Na isn’t going for a clean line drive. He has made a big hunk of entertainment, one that barrels at us with the force of a city-destroying monster, and in a weird way, it’s more endearing because it doesn’t all work.