Hashima

In a word, WOW! After the decent Veteran and the great The Berlin File, Seung-Wan Ryoo is moving from the action genre to the historical-war genre and has made not only the most expensive but also the best Korean film I've seen this year. The stellar cast is literally a treat: my favorite Jeong-min Hwang with Ji-sub So and the new young battle-hardened star Joong-ki Song are incredibly good. The film describes the events of a harsh concentration camp on an island in the middle of the Ocean where Koreans are forced to mine coal under strict Japanese supervision. The atmosphere is literally haunting, properly dirty and very hopeless. I have absolutely no complaints about the action, it is very varied and there is plenty of it. The explosions in the mines and the perfect bombing from the planes are amazing, and the whole film culminates in a half hour escape that is not only spectacularly shot but also very realistic and raw, there is no shortage of dead children or women and the borderline violence reaches a Korean peak (I had countless orgasms during the film). To top it all off there are strong emotions where I screamed through half the film. Great production design, amazing soundtrack, awesome action, decent amount of violence. That's what I call a f*cking movie. 95% (19.09.2017)

Koreans just know how to make great films, and definitely historical ones. This is not just a glimpse into history, but more importantly, it's a fairly deep probe into all the places where the Japanese have been showing up as animals. It wasn't just toward the Chinese, but evidently also the Koreans, and of course the Americans and others. And someone managed to stand up to them a little bit. (18.03.2018)