Hope Review : Na Hong-jin’s Madcap Alien Attack Movie Perfects The Art of Chase Spectacle

A decade after South Korean auteur Na Hong-jin took the world by storm with horror hit The Wailing, he returns with a demented monster movie. Hope premiered in Cannes Competition earlier this year, an audacious, eyebrow-raising outlier choice. Expectations are naturally immense. At its best, Hope is a thrilling demonstration of dynamite action filmmaking. But it’s also scraggly, unwieldy and prone to flat characterisation. Your experience will vary dramatically on certain expectations. As a big-scale apocalyptic outing, Hope is ambitious, frustrating, misjudged and yet genuinely surprising. That it can flit between so many things is in itself a total departure from the dead-eyed generic drudgery that hogs popular Hollywood blockbusters.

In a small town called Hope Harbour, which sits on the North Korea-South Korean border, a police chief, Bum-Seok, (Hwang Jung-Min) is rattled by bizarre episodes. A trail of carnage has been unleashed. The officer tries to parse meaning in the revelation of mutilated animals. Could it be a tiger that’s broken loose? But the signs of bigger danger grow troubling. When the film opens, the town has already emptied out. People have either fled or been mangled to death by the unknown lurking predator. The first hour of Hope is a masterclass in orchestrating tantalising, dread-suffused anticipation. All we hear are sounds of the supposed supersized monster prowling at the edges. Cars are just smashed away, blown off like leaves in the air. Jung-Min mines the most from refreshing comic chaos of an officer thrust with way too much opposition than he signed up for. Bum-Seok is barely agile.

That forte belongs to the eagle-eyed rookie cop, Sung-ae (a barnstorming Jung Ho-yeon). Watching Ho-yeon don and fire the bulkiest ammo, from rifles to lobbing grenades, gives a delirious high. She’s just as quietly piercing in a later moment of sudden reckoning.

Na devotes a lot of Hope to the investigation of the monsters that turn out to be aliens. Unfortunately, these make for the film’s most awkward, thinly realised passages. There’s unnecessary fuss over the strange biology of the aliens that barely results in anything compelling. But Na does extract chuckles from the sight of a revved-up medic straggling to dissect and dig through the flesh of a dead baby alien. The surgeon gets on the table, tries various implements and stabs with great vim. Hope might not have the most well-realised characters, but flies with such eccentricities and small moments. The clash of disparate energies feeds ample comic relief, even as the film treads shaky ground particularly in the middle section. A slump sinks in. Several characters are introduced, including the chief’s cousin and ferocious warrior, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung).

Hope is disproportionate, unsure in arrangement and design. It’s riddled with tracks that do little. A long sequence on the alien spaceship stands testament to Lee Hwo-kyoung’s intricate, mysterious production design. However, its linkages to latter alien dominance are faint. Even Hope’s plot threads are loosely marshalled. It runs on parallel tangents, hoping to converge the myriad discoveries into a later point. However, apart from a wry detour, where a character recounts his first encounter with the impossibly tall, lanky aliens while shitting in the woods, there’s little that endures in innovation. Then, there’s the tacky CGI itself, burying Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender. The minute the aliens do protrude in daylight, the intrigue in the impeccably engineered buildup is replaced by disappointment. Your experience of Hope also rides heavily on how far you can overlook the dowdy visual effects. Ace cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo steers the experience with gobsmacking camera movements. A dance, a duel between predator and prey has rarely been as visceral as Hope mounts.

The question of plausibility is also something that can’t be overly insisted on in a film of this scope and dimension. Admittedly, Na’s script does struggle to match the otherwise relentless, invigorating pulse of his hardcore action choreography. There are moments when the film veers dangerously close to a narrative standstill. Tedium threatens to set in especially when characters operate almost sans a context. Their interactions and relationships are cursorily fleshed, with motivation foisted to the backseat. This diffuseness has a way of detracting from emotional stakes. But as long as the film swings back into the hot seat, Hope stays unbeatable, undeniable–a pure throbbing force that surges beyond.

Hope boasts easily the most breathlessly kinetic chase sequences seen in any film this year. The action swerves from ruined streets to forests to highways. There’s real conviction and electricity in these bends. Na bypasses the pitfalls of characters and due situational buildup, cranking up a sense of manic grandeur. Zo In-sung’s horse-riding scenes are more majestic than they have any right to be. A dash through the woods, rendered in vast wide-angle compositions, is just staggering. The second hour goes all out with gory glee. The swagger, the velocity with which these hunts play out keep Hope boundlessly exhilarating.

The peak arrives in the climax as a highway and a speeding alien combine in one of the year’s most stupefying sequences. Again, the final ten minutes are baffling, randomly inserting a wider gesture at world-building and teasing a sequel. But this doesn’t drown out the glorious highs Hope lands one after another.