Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Tarmac on December 05, 2005, 12:21:14 AM
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Saw it on the $14.99 shelves at Best Buy last weekend (never heard of it otherwise), so I read some reviews online and then went out on a limb and bought it.
It's a South Korean film about two brothers in the Korean War, told from a Korean perspective. Watch it in Korean with the English subtitles - as usual, voiceovers are crap.
As a war movie, it's incredible. It's "Saving Private Ryan"-ish as it has the fictional personal/family aspect to the story, but it does a good job of conveying the prewar, wartime, and postwar atmosphere from a soldier's point of view. The brother aspect of the story is, somewhat predictably, an allegory for the war itself. The movie does an excellent job of capturing the generally crappy civil war situations that you don't really hear about from an American perspective. The battle scenes are great too, but it's a character driven movie so they're just eye candy.
I'm not a movie reviewer, so I won't blabber on too much about it. Rent it, buy it, add it to your Netflix list, whatever. If you own SPR, this one should be in your collection too.
Anybody else seen it, or even heard about it before?
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Hi Tarmac,
I'm a foreign movie/war movie buff, so I picked this one up as soon as I could. If you liked Brotherhood of War, you'll probably also like Shiri which is a Spy/Adventure flick by the same director.
Personally, I didn't like Tae Guk Gi that much, it had the same kind of sentimentality/angst mix you see in Korean Soap Operas, mixed with the extreme violence that is becoming a Jae-gyu Kang trademark. The director was obviously trying to get the Saving Private Ryan feel, but I think it comes off as a poor immitation. Shiri is a better movie. But hey, that's just my opinion. For what it's worth, a Korean member of our congregation, who liked Saving Private Ryan didn't like Tae Guk Gi either.
Glad you liked it though.
BTW - for Korean movies, leave the audio in Korean and just read the English subtitles, that should help. Voiceovers ruin most Korean and Japanese movies - especially Akira Kurasawa's classics.
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No experience with Korean soaps, so no basis for comparison there. :) You thought the violence was notably bad? Of course it's violent, but I didn't find it any worse than Platoon's violence or SPR's gore (the final battle seemed to drag a bit though). I thought it lived up to the SPR feel quite well.
And I know better than to watch any movie with English voiceovers. I'll usually turn the English on for a few minutes the second time I watch it, just for a chuckle.
I think I enjoyed it more for the atmosphere it created than the plot. The movie did a good job of portraying the desperation of the early war evacuations and conscriptions, the exuberance of the Inchon landings and pushing back the North, and then the heartbreaking, desperate defeats when the Chinese crossed the Yalu. It also showed a lot of the gut-wrenching neighbor v. neighbor atrocity that's so common to any civil war story -- stuff which is never talked about much in media from an American POV.
Plus Korea is definately a forgotten war, and it's good to see any material about it, especially from a "native" perspective.