An excellent movie that depicts the soldiers' feelings about waiting for a truce and sent to take a hill again and again. Especially when only 12 hours remain and a general in the rear (and safe) wants them to take the hill again.
5つ星のうち5.0Amazing movie easily competing with Hollywood
2020年12月27日にカナダでレビュー済み
Amazonで購入
Great movie about a war that is often forgotten by the western world, in the wake of WW2 and overshadowed by the upcoming Vietnam conflict. Korean made movies are consistently very solid and honest depictions of their conflict that still isn’t fully resolved till this day, and this movie focuses on the boarder that is the cause of many of these issues. Great action scenes, amazing effects and gritty violence on huge war torn sets are very impressive to the eye, and the story within is much more down to earth and character and moral involved than a lot of war movies are. Shows that Korean War cinema is very competitive with the rest of the world, and this is and The Brotherhood of War are their top films, and the top films of the conflict from any nation
"Do you guys know why you are losing? Because you don't know the reason you are fighting." (Paraphrase) A North Korean commander lectures a group of South Korean prisoners during the opening weeks of the war, and surprisingly, let's them go because he believes that the war will be over soon. This line is one of the key quotes that fuses this well-built war drama together: to show the ferocity, the futility, and cruelty during a war of attrition...and both sides lose.
Lt. Kang Eun-pyo from Counter Intelligence is given an assignment in the last few weeks of the Korean War, during the close of the long and arduous truce talks between North Korea/China and South Korea/The UN. Reports from the Eastern Front show that there is a spy within the Republic of Korea camp, where there are letters being sent out from the North Korean side to the South, and a commanding officer was shot...with a bullet from a South Korean weapon. Eun-pyo and a new CO, along with a raw recruit, head to the front to find a dazed and battle-hardened "Alligator Unit." This unit has been fighting back and forth against the enemy for the Aerok Hills, which up to this point in the movie has been lost and won several times. Eun-pyo finds unusual circumstances among the camp such as a very young captain who is addicted to morphine, a crazy soldier who keeps asking "where is 2nd platoon," and finally running into his best friend Su-hyeok whom he thought he lost during the North Korean invasion. Everything is changed and the will to battle is more about orders rather than patriotism. We find later that there are moments of compromise and cooperation between the Northern and Southern sides in a very unusual plot twist.
As the story unfolds, the director sets the atmosphere of attrition and the viewer gets a feel of how grueling it must be for this unit to survive and do their best to keep their sanity. The opening battle scenes watching the ROK soldiers climbing the hills to dislodge the North Koreans is bitter, long, and tough to watch. Later in the film the North takes it back, which leaves a feeling of void to see the waste of life over a few miles of land (ala WWI). You see the film as not of a story of courageous men who feel that they must finish the war, but of a tired unit who wants to go home. You see scenes of the North Koreans as well who have this same mood in their camp. Each character is haunted by their past, but at this point the fatigue of war has clouded the judgment of each soldier to the point where survival vs. right and wrong rule their decisions. Eun-pyo comes to this realization and is horrified, but slowly towards the end he too sees why the soldiers do these things.
This has been one of the more better war films I have seen in a while, especially for a foreign war film. Though over dramatic at times, I felt it has done a better job in many areas to display the reality of war compared to the other blockbuster film, "Taegukgi." The violence is raw and ferocious, but you see that this film also displays humor, camaraderie, depth, and fairness to both sides. It has elements of Catch-22 of fighting a losing battle while the truce talks are going on, especially after everyone loses reason to fight. A must recommended film to see the human price paid for a war that has destroyed a nation: where war is now meaningless and where minds break.