Strange Invaders
By Dan Schindel
Hope
Dir. Na Hong-jin, South Korea, NEON
The small seaside town of Hope Harbor, already isolated by surrounding mountains and its proximity to the Korean Demilitarized Zone, has been further cut off by wildfires that have drawn away most emergency workers and knocked out communications services. Which is rotten luck when hostile aliens are wreaking havoc. Exploring this fictional place in his new film Hope, writer-director Na Hong-jin offers no more than the suggestion of a community. We are introduced to the town at its outskirts, as police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) investigates a call over a mauled cow. By the time he returns to Hope Harbor, it’s wrecked and nearly devoid of living residents, the better to serve as a playground for action-movie mayhem. There is barely the pretense of a traditional first act before Hope hits the gas, seldom relenting over two and a half hours of alternating chases and tense investigations.
Na is most comfortable with the engine throttle held open. Over his career, he’s moved away from concerns about character, dialogue, or theme (and sometimes plot coherence) to experiment with the primal attractions of genre conventions. He explores the serial killer procedural in The Chaser (2008), the crime thriller in The Yellow Sea (2010), and ghosts, possession, and exorcism in The Wailing (2016). His works are indulgent—more so over time as their mounting box-office successes have given him freer reins—luxuriating in extended runtimes and replaying variations on the same note just to see what kind of sound it makes. By my conservative recollection, there are at least nine high-drama moments in Hope in which a character stares down their gun barrel to line up a shot at a rapidly encroaching alien. Around a third of those moments are suspenseful and exciting, while the others lack impact due to that shameless repetition. There’s an ungainly rhythm of excitement and enervation.
The first hour of Hope is a land-based riff on Jaws in which Bum-seok stumbles through the ruined town in search of the alien ravaging it, glimpsing carnage from afar and hearing but not seeing the creature. The sense of mystery wears off as the movie keeps running Bum-seok through these motions, the intrigue curdling into exasperated impatience. The middle section, in which disparate characters learn more about the aliens, is a mess of mismatched pacing between these threads. While the structural editing is loose, the moment-to-moment cutting can be frankly amateurish, especially during the action. One climactic car chase builds to a dramatic gesture that happens offscreen, making the scene briefly incoherent.
Hope has the highest budget of any made in Korea to date, reportedly the equivalent of $46 million. That money was well-spent on location work, convincingly making a whole town a ruin and taking the production to the handsome forests of Romania for its wilderness-based last section. The costs did not extend to creating fully believable or appealing animation. Close-ups of the aliens (especially slow-motion shots, of which there are many) look fake in a way we haven’t seen in live-action film since the late ’90s, with the CGI sometimes obviously two-dimensional. The movie covers for this by having the aliens move with uncannily rendered speed, turning the animation’s unnaturalness into an asset in conveying the beings’ otherworldly quality. It’s especially horrifying when they easily tear apart the humans, which happens with gleeful frequency.
As much as he enjoys genre conventions, Na also loves puncturing them. A running joke is someone asking where all the heavy weaponry came from or how a friend acquired their horse-riding skills, met with someone else scolding, “That’s not important right now!” His favorite way to toy with genre is to thrust characters into situations they’re laughably unsuited for, like the sleazy cop-turned-pimp who takes half of The Chaser to realize he’s dealing with a serial killer or the easily duped townsfolk of The Wailing. Bum-seok’s attempt to play the authoritative sheriff is undermined early on when he hands his cool-guy sunglasses to a bumpkin who then tries them on behind his back. He trembles and scatters shotgun shells when he tries to load his weapon to stalk an alien and is continually shown up by his much more competent, cool-headed deputy Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon). If a character gets to actually act heroically, it won’t be long before they get brutally owned, either by an alien or absurd random misfortune. (The film’s best, funniest scene expertly tees up such a moment as a group praises one guy with cartoonish reverence as he hangs in an alarmingly vulnerable position.)
That sense of humor is part of a dark, often cruel streak in Na’s films. He tends toward shaggy dog stories about people who lose everything because of their incompetence, societal dysfunction, and a near-cosmic amount of bad luck. In The Chaser, the police can’t hold onto a man in their custody who openly boasts of his sadistic murders. In The Wailing, the lost knowledge of traditional folklore leaves a town helpless before a demonic threat. There are hints of allegory in Hope for Korea’s lack of agency as a proxy between superpowers, underlined by many shots of signs warning about mines, spies, and vigilance. The characters increasingly realize how out of their depth they are as they learn about the aliens—each twist reveals either that there are more creatures than the humans thought, or that they are even harder to kill than they seemed. Despite the militaristic setting and their attempts at playing cowboy (made literal in a sequence in which they take to horseback), the cast is nearly hopeless against a powerful threat they barely understand.
The aliens’ foreignness is metatextually reinforced by the film’s use of actors borrowed from Hollywood (Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton) to perform their facial capture and voices. Amidst the nonstop chaos, the film finds something close to real pathos in using the communication gulf between the humans and aliens to excoriate xenophobia and ignorance—it turns out the creatures aren’t attacking out of one-dimensional malice but retaliating against one hunter’s thoughtless aggression.
As the film swerves into a last-minute reveal of a vaster alien threat, it becomes evident that Hope is wrapping nothing up. It would be a tremendous gag if the film were introducing a flurry of alien names and concepts to take the piss out of how “cinematic universes” constantly tease and never provide closure. The characters survive one calamity, only to haplessly watch a greater one burn across the horizon. A clichéd blockbuster cliffhanger becomes a total context collapse for the poor saps who have to live through it. But Na has affirmed his intention to create a series, with a sequel already written. Meaning Hope is just another movie more invested in stringing an audience along than standing on its own.