Hope, director Na Hong-jin’s first feature in a decade, is also his splashiest film. It first premiered in competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, its presence in the category generating buzzy anticipation, and now NEON is set to release the movie across 1,500 or so U.S. theaters, a theatrical footprint not seen for a Korean-language film since Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. This all-in approach signals that Hope is coming stateside with blockbuster aspirations, a late summer, auteur-driven, sci-fi epic with the juice to appeal to casual filmgoers and cinephiles alike.
Leading Hope is Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the police chief of the eponymous Hope Harbor village. On a partly cloudy day he receives a call from his cousin, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), to rendezvous with him and his pack of headstrong hunting friends. A bull carcass lies rotting in the road. Something has left ghastly claw marks etched in its side, something much larger and more determinedly brutal than the stowaway tiger suggested to be the culprit. The men split up to investigate; yet by the time Bum-seok has driven back to Hope Harbor, all hell has broken loose. In his cruiser and later on his feet, he proceeds deeper into the besieged village, demolished buildings and disemboweled civilians appearing with greater abundance. Soon he and the other locals discover the alien nature of the threat, ratcheting up the conflict’s stakes to catastrophic levels.
Hope‘s first hour or so, powered by Na’s masterful command of slow-burning tension, is bracing and paranoic. We track through the devastation, an unnerving silence blanketing the streets and emphasizing every stray sound and distant roar. With danger nowhere in sight, it may as well be omnipresent, finding temporary refuge in some shadow until it’s ready to strike again. Fear of the unknown, that well-trodden alien invasion flick theme, is woven into the fabric of the film’s visual language, while shots frame the characters either claustrophobically, at oddly intimate angles, or from a remove, highlighting their smallness in a situation quickly spiraling out of their control. And once the film’s action gets underway, the violence is thrillingly visceral: bullets fly, buildings get smashed through, and trucks flip, with the sound design amplifying every thunderous impact.
Touches of darkly absurd humor — a winning staple of Na’s films — provides some room to breathe without undercutting the mounting pressure. Along the way toward what could be his doom, Bum-seok suffers slights from several of the village’s mostly elderly residents questioning his competence and his courage. While a bit gruff and easily agitated, Bum-seok is firmly in good cop territory, and watching him weathering these lightly mean digs is meant to endear us to him. How many times have we all, with foreknowledge or without, been thrust into circumstances leaving us feeling way out of our depth? Not until he teams up with the enterprising, M16A1-toting rookie cop Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon) do things start to look up for him. At times slapstick-leaning or giddily unhinged, vulgar or dry as dead leaves, the comedic moments and stretches in Hope rank among its best features. It’s a crucial aspect to get right in a story that could be read as a comedy of errors with a cosmic twist.
There’s an excellent foundation here, so it’s disappointing that after such a strong start Hope never truly takes off. Following the film’s first extraterrestrial encounter, the story slows down to deploy various revelations that lack revelatory oomph. Either they edge toward something illuminating but purposefully leave certain explanatory stones unturned — as with the discussion of the alien’s uncannily familiar physiology — or they hinge on information that, entertaining delivery aside, is unsatisfactorily obvious (of course there are additional aliens, there’s still more than half of this movie left to go). Part of this writer’s gripe here is that any exposure to the film’s promotional material, even a cursory glance at the trailer, gives away the fact that aliens are involved. Yet it takes the characters a meaningful chunk of the runtime to connect these dots, and little is done with the resulting dramatic irony. If there was deeper exploration of the characters in these quieter moments, richer distinctions in their responses to the collapse of everyday order, the film would be all the better for it. But Hope is less concerned with the interiority of its core ensemble than it is with the rigorous calibration of its spectacle. The characters, as much as the viewers, are just along for the ride.
Central to the action spectacle are those aliens, notably voiced by the non-Korean ensemble of Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton. The choice elevates the contrast between the local characters and the interstellar invaders on a meta-level, while also reinforcing the sense that Hope is shooting for greater commercial heights. It also subtly indicates that these aliens are more than the mindless monsters they initially appear to be, that they exist as unique characters themselves, ones compelling enough to get some big names attached to this project. But by the time this becomes clear, the movie is wrapping up, not just leaving loose ends but concluding at a point where the story is beginning to truly open up, its greater scope peeking out from the clouds, plummeting into view, and crash-landing, the impact’s ramifications now the source of mystery. The franchise machines dominating the cinematic landscape have taught us to expect movies to set up other movies; content begets content. Hope’s ending setting up a sequel is no sin in itself, but the way it does so — completely recontextualizing the conflict and then cutting things off abruptly — recontextualizes the film itself in a way so that it no longer functions as well as a standalone. Call this a two-and-a-half-hour-long deep dive into a larger story’s inciting incident, its attempt at open-endedness instead registering as a frustrating incompleteness.
Hope’s VFX work has been a consistent source of criticism, particularly concerning the aliens’ renderings. Yes, they have a plasticky glitchiness that can be immersion-breaking, but funnily enough, it’s that same uncanny valley effect that adds to their menace, stokes that sense of primal aversion to their otherness, their wrongness. Ironically, it almost justifies the Hope Harbor denizens’ reflexive enmity toward them, that and the corpses they leave in their wake. The village, set around the Korean Demilitarized Zone, is an insular place, surrounded by mines and signs warning of espionage and subversion. Hope’s true antagonist is a thematic one: the divisive ideologies that establish an “us” and a “them,” direct people to narrowly essentialize rather than curiously empathize with one another. When we treat everything unfamiliar as a threat, the film says, that will lead to misunderstandings, ones that engender subsequent ones until we’re all careening toward a world-ending cataclysm.
DIRECTOR: Na Hong-jin; CAST: Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: September 9; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 37 min.
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