Pieman
Army.ca Veteran
- Reaction score
- 28
- Points
- 530
I would like to highly reccommend the following movie. It is a foreign South Korean film, that is about two brothers who fight together in the Korean war. It is of high quality and beautifully filmed. I was shocked because IMHO it is the same quality as 'Saving Private Ryan' or 'Band of Brothers' (though not as historically accurate as BOB, I suspect) It has a beautiful story line, and some simply ghastly violent scenes, they did not shy away from trying to show the brutalities of war in this movie. I suspect the battle scenes and general plot to the movie was historically accurate. The characters are probably made up or loosely based upon real people. I was unable to find any info on that. Watch this, it is a war classic in my books.
The official webpage can be found here:
http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/taegukgi/
From sfgate:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/03/DDGUH8I5A31.DTL&type=movies
The official webpage can be found here:
http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/taegukgi/
From sfgate:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/03/DDGUH8I5A31.DTL&type=movies
'Taegukgi'
War drama. Starring Jang Dong-kun, Won Bin. Written and Directed by Kang Je-gyu. (Not rated. 142 minutes. At the Galaxy.).
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If "Taegukgi," an intense, powerful Korean War film, had been an American production, filmed in English, it would be playing at all the multiplexes across the Bay Area and have a place on many critics' short lists for Academy Award consideration. Instead, it appears that only a lucky few will see it in scattered art houses around the bay.
Too bad, because there's really something going on lately in South Korean cinema - while the Hong Kong film industry battles economic problems and piracy, and Japan's market is TV-saturated, filmmakers from Seoul are making genre-bending, risk-taking fare that has nourished the region's box office and intrigued international film festival juries.
"Taegukgi," about two brothers who are conscripted into the South Korean army and begin to drift apart emotionally in the heat of frequent, bloody battles, is the latest Korean film to openly long for reunification of North and South. Others have couched their messages in a murder mystery (the DMZ drama "JSA") or an action thriller ("Shiri"), but here we have the Korean War itself, framed in a flashback structure a la "Saving Private Ryan."
Locals are responding; released in South Korea on Feb. 5, the most expensive Korean film ever ($12.8 million, looking like a $150 million Hollywood movie) is the leading moneymaker in that country, with nearly four times the admissions of the year's No. 2 film, the American epic "Troy."
"Taegukgi," named after the South Korean flag, opens in the present day when an elderly man gets a phone call. An archaeological dig has uncovered remains from a long-ago battlefield, and it appears that they belong to the man's older brother, who has been listed as missing in action for 50 years. Flash back to 1950, when Jin-tae (Jang Dong-kun), the protective older brother, and Jin-seok (Won Bin), his bookish younger brother, are happily living in a town near the 38th parallel. Jin-tae's beautiful wife, Young-shin, (Lee Eun- ju) runs a shop that is just beginning to be successful. They have two children.
War breaks out, and the brothers are drafted. Thinking that being a war hero (or getting killed) will allow his younger brother to go home, Jin-tae volunteers for every dangerous mission, and becomes addicted to the violence of battle. Jin-seok becomes horrified at his brother's bloodthirstiness, and thus writer-director Kang Jegyu ("Shiri") sets into a motion a morality play that assesses the cost of war, and how it changes a human being, a family and an entire nation.
Epic in scope and violent in a way that every war film has to be since "Saving Private Ryan," "Taegukgi" is a big-time movie that never loses sight of its human story.
Advisory: Extremely violent scenes of war and torture, and strong language.
-- G. Allen Johnson