South Korea is on its way to being the country that knows best how to frame post apocalypse with an unusually understated sense of humor.Besides the memorable Snowpiercer and Host, we are now treated to Hope, wherein a small coastal South Korean town faces an invasion like no other in most sci-fi adventures.
Writer/director Na Hong-jin carefully prepares us and the town’s chief cop, Beom-seok (Hwang Jung-min), for a disruption leaving dead animals and humans in its wake. With a wildly impetuous camera, Hong prepares us for a confrontation with several monsters reminiscent of Predator and Prometheus with their human traits and large inhuman presence.
Beom is intrepid in his pursuit of the monsters bringing a different approach from the usual monsters-gobbling-humans motif—he pursues the aliens in the face of losses for his good-old-cousins hunting gleefully with inadequate weapons and not much of a plan.
The joy of this film is the relentless citizens pursuing monsters while swearing and spitting epithets at each other and the monsters. The pursuit is daring and funny, especially when other officers join the pursuit like the fetching young officer who can swear and weald arms with the best of them.
The car race is a delight, fast and furious and revealing a sympathetic twist for the monsters just gently introduced along the way. It’s a humane take on the usual chase with lots of Keystone Cops and Three Stooges. Don’t forget another surprise: Michael Fassbinder and Alicia Vikander are embedded in the story with cheery understatement and a promise of more to come.
Hope is a sci-fi alien treatment with scares and jokes not like most others you have ever seen. Give the South Koreans a big American hooray—they are as good as we are, if not better.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio.Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com