Hope, 2026.
Directed by Na Hong-jin.
Starring Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Lee Sang-hee, Um Mun-suk, Im Hyun-sik, Hwang Seok-jeong, Han Woo-yeol, Chyu Kwang-hyun, Oh Doo-won, Yoo Jun-hong, Seo Beom-sik, and Baek Seung-chul.
SYNOPSIS:
A mysterious discovery is made on the outskirts of the remote harbor town. The residents find themselves in a desperate fight for survival against something they have never encountered before.
It’s difficult to know where to begin with Na Hong-jin’s ambitious monster movie. A chimera of influences, from Jaws, though Attack on Titan, and even Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. It veers from the sublime to the ridiculous, multiple times, and it all depends on if you fully commit to these violent swings throughout the course of its 160-minute runtime as to whether you enjoy the experience.
The build-up is excellent. A small-town community increasingly worried by the appearance of mutilated cattle invokes the early beats of events on Amity Island. Locals blame it on a tiger which has been rumoured to travel down through North Korea, while the police chief is panicking about his lack of manpower in the face of these increasing anomalies.
It sets a tone, that for the first hour at least works magnificently. The confusion and chaos, wonderfully manifested in the performance of Hwang Jung-min’s reluctant cop, leads to that rare balance of humour and suspense, putting the viewer in a state of unease that pays off once the carnage begins. And when the action kicks off following Hong-jin’s deliberate slow burn set-up, Hope delivers one of the tightest, tensest and thrilling hours of cinema you’ll see all year.
Largely confined to the small-town setting, with occasional cutaways to a parallel and less engaging story of hunters seeking the ‘tiger’ in the surrounding forest, we follow our police chief through broken buildings and abandoned shops, a trail of destruction peppered with gruesomely disposed of bodies and traumatised witnesses. He gets a travelling companion along the way (Im Hyun Shik), which provides some nice moments of comic relief, before we finally get to see the creature, which has been teased Spielberg-style with off-screen roars and flying cars.
Anime-influenced, the monster is reminiscent of the spirits of The Grudge melded with the giant sprinting beasts of Attack on Titan. It’s feral and unrelenting in the way it squishes humans like bugs. A real weighty threat, despite its obvious CG veneer. As a payoff to the mystery up to that point, it works.
Here’s the thing. Hope is a film of two distinct halves. The first is a brutal, propulsive actioner, while the second is about ten genres in one. The tipping point for the film arrives as punctuation to the brilliant opening, in a moment where Hong-jin flips the film on its head by giving the monster motivation behind the murderous rampage. It’s an interesting and unexpected move.
The King Kong/Super 8 shift in perspective is welcome, because as fun as the destruction has been, almost three hours of it would have been tedious. It’s where the story goes next that could bring Hope crashing down to Earth for your casual viewer, or those not willing to submit to the unfolding madness.
Without giving too much away, Hope ends up feeling like two-thirds of a trilogy when you were only expecting one film. There are multiple gear shifts in the final third that veer from genuine intrigue (Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander) to incredulous WTF (Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander…again) that you could be forgiven for bailing on caring about what’s going on.
The ingenuity and less-is-more approach is replaced by a throw as much as you can at the screen and see what sticks mentality. Characters are beaten to within an inch of their life, over and over again, by now indistinguishable Transformers-style beasts, only to appear riding a horse, or hanging from a car like they are in a Michael Bay movie. It’s all just a little disappointing when you think back 120 minutes and remember how great the beginning was.
You can’t fault its ambition, but by trying to cram too many ideas into its lengthy runtime, Hope evolves from a lean exercise in effective terror to a bloated Sci-Fi that abandons the fun and crashes under the weight of all the bonkers things that are going on.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★/ Movie ★ ★ ★
Matt Rodgers – Follow me on Twitter
