7MMO
Moderator
By the time I sat down with Na Hong-jin and his translator at a way-too-big hotel conference room table across the street from Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, the director and writer already had the biggest movie in Korea. His latest film, Hope, had set the year’s record for opening-weekend admissions in the country, accounting for 66% of all movie ticket sales. Yet he wasn’t reveling in the success for his first movie in 10 years.
“All I could think about was, ‘What's it going to look like next week or even a week after?’” said Na as he looked toward the imminent threat of The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
And yeah, those near-generational behemoths might have knocked Hope off its two-week box office reign at the top of Korean cinema. But, much like the characters (aliens, especially) in the blistering, rip-roaring action sci-fi, Hope wouldn’t stay down for long. Before its release in the US this week, distributor Neon announced it would open in 1,500 theaters — the most a Korean film has had since Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning Parasite — and on premium screens like 4DX. (Of the latter, a good chunk of showings have sold out in major cities.) In its first day in theaters, Hope made more than $1 million.
Hope — the most expensive Korean film to-date — is unlike anything else you’ll see this year. Starring Hwang Jung-min as a small-town police chief, Squid Game’s Jung Ho-yeon as a rookie cop, and Zo In-sung as a townie cowboy, the film is about aliens coming to Hope Harbor, a tiny town located right along the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. The structure and pace of the film is fascinating, delivering one climax after another as Na examines the locals’ response to the aliens, and the tone is both super-serious and funny in a way that fits in with movies like Jordan Peele’s Nope or Zack Cregger’s Barbarian. Even in three-minute trailers, people were tickled by the amount of swearing, and in a nod to the discourse, Na confirmed the Korean word for “fuck” is featured 137 times.
Hope’s journey to theatrical release is as unique as the movie. First, it premiered in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in May. This wasn’t Na’s first time showing work at the prestigious festival in the south of France — in fact, all three of his previous movies (The Chaser, The Yellow Sea, and The Wailing) screened there — but it was the first time he’d be competing for the big awards, like the Palm d’Or. Hope was the first Korean film to be in competition in four years; the last was Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, which left the 2022 festival with the Best Director award in hand. It didn’t win, but its inclusion as an alien action blockbuster alongside the “serious” dramas more typical of the festival felt like a victory of its own. The general consensus around the early clips circulating online was a resounding “hell yeah.”
The reviews out of Cannes, however, were more polarizing. We gave it a 9; in his review, Siddhant Adlakha wrote that Hope “launches a gonzo sensory assault with an action-comedy-thriller saga of a small town beset by forces much larger than itself. [...] It’s a nonstop blast with the kind of low-to-the-ground vehicular and horseback action that’ll have you falling off the front of your seat.” Other critics were less enamored, specifically whomping on the CGI aliens; Indiewire, for example, slammed it as having some of the “worst creature effects this side of the Syfy Channel or The Mummy Returns.” Despite, or perhaps because of, the strong reactions, it was one of the buzziest movies at the festival.
The fuss around the aliens and their designs is not lost on Na, who’s been asked about the creatures in probably every single interview he’s given about this movie, and it’s not hard to figure out why it’s been such a curiosity. They were brought to life with real human actors — Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton — using a unique motion-capture that rendered their performances on location in real time into the huge, odd-looking, shape-shifting creatures. The VFX work will certainly inspire opinions, but I found them kind of charming, especially in the jankier moments. In one scene, Vikander’s alien queen, which would not be out of place as an Awakened Being in the Claymore manga, lurches fluidly through a forest. In another, Fassbender’s alien warrior, in its Xenomorph-cheetah-dog form, sprints in a way that uncannily reminded me of the Forest Demon in a Smiling Friends Halloween episode. The off-putting nature of the beasts was intentional, both in terms of the bigger thematic picture of Hope and what Na was going for in having the “creatures fighting a battle in the daytime” with no dark corners or shadows for the CGI to hide behind, especially as the aliens get their asses kicked.
“The final look of the creatures in the movie that you see are over the course of six months; these creatures have gone through so many changes,” Na told me. “They are much more fucked up. They got a lot of injuries. In the end, it just didn't look the same as anything that we've seen before.”
Following Cannes, Hope was the centerpiece of the New York Asian Film Festival. Then, breaking from the festival circuit, it came to San Diego Comic-Con. And in the time in between his appearances in France and the US, Na went back into post-production, re-editing the film. The Cannes version, four-ish minutes longer than the final cut, was rushed out the door for the festival. Though he reworked scenes and the sound, the aliens remained largely untouched. He told the Comic-Con audience he had finished two weeks prior.
It’s not the only film to have made the jump from glitzy film festival to the massive nerd fan event — even this year, the out-of-competition Victorian Psycho starring Maika Monroe also came to both — but it is the first to have a dedicated panel in a gigantic room. (Dune: Part 1 would have completed the Venice to Comic-Con pipeline had SDCC 2021 not been a largely virtual event.) “It didn’t feel like Earth here,” Na said at the top of his panel in Ballroom 20, the second-largest space in the convention center. “I am aware that this is a very different space from traditional film festivals,” Na told me before taking the stage. “I honestly think that fandom-centered audiences would enjoy this movie a lot more. In fact, I think those are the kind of audiences who would enjoy all of my films a lot more.”
Na’s films do all have a genre sensibility that falls somewhere between, as the New Yorker’s Justin Chang described, “the aspirations of the art house and the pleasures of the grind house.” His first two films, 2008’s The Chaser and 2010’s The Yellow Sea, are gritty beat-em-up gangster movies. The Wailing, his 2016 breakout in the West that consistently lands on “best Korean movies”-type lists, was a blood-soaked shamanic mystery. Hope fits right alongside his violent folly-of-humans stories, where the aliens and humans aren’t so different.
“It's very heartbreaking and in the end you feel really, really bad for them,” Na told me. “At first you think these are aliens who just attack and hurt people. But then in the end, you realize that they're actually very pitiful creatures. And there's a metaphor to that element as well. This is the kind of story that we're trying to tell.”
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