Hope Movie Review:

Where does your focus lie in an action film, beyond the action itself? Is it the characters or the story? Action films of the current era, stage themselves to pull your concentration into what they makers want you to. But that means, in a more realistic scenario we are not considering the entirety of the subject's environment. In Na Hong-jin's Hope, the elements of the monster genre or the horror genre are set aside to focus on the entirety of a character's environment. While this teeters the film's visuals into a dangerous arena of looking like a video game, Hope is an immersive and thrilling journey, with some faults in its writing.

Director: Na Hong-jin

Cast: Hwang Jung-min, Jung Ho-yeon, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender

In Hope, two elements that mainly make up the immersive experience complement each other deftly. One is the characters that make up the film. When we think of characters that survive every environment, we think of one character who acts as an anchor, who knows it all, and guides other characters like a beacon with infallible characteristics. But in Hope, no character is treated as this infallible hero. The protagonist, Hope Harbour's police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), makes a lot of random choices, which either works or results in something as bad as killing a man. He is irritable, sometimes slow, but not a loser. On the other hand, Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), another police officer, is the most efficient character in the film, who is highly skilled in surviving a monster attack. But she doubts herself sometimes and seeks approval too. Na Hong-jin's walks the fine line in portraying the characters as a human, without pushing the characters into the loser chasm.

The other element that makes the immersive experience of Hope, is the cinematography, itself. While there are very few tight close-ups of the actors, the rest of the shots are spent showcasing the character along with their environment. After a monster attack, the town of Hope Harbour is ransacked and empty. Everyone are either hiding or have escaped, and this eerie, empty space is also accompanied by unpredictability in the form of debris. We see Ko Bum-seok struggle to navigate, stumble, fall, and get up all while evading the monster, in a panic-filled frenzy. As Ko Bum-seok runs through the streets in wanting to fight with the monster we see him make a lot of wrong choices, increasing the thrill. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo along with Na Hong-jin, uses very human moments like these to tune the environment, with resorting to suggestive framing. The cinematographer also fills the entire film with dynamic shots, even in the smallest moments, to never lose grip over the audience's adrenaline.

But in delving completely into building up the environment, Hope falters in its writing, including the film's ending. After spending time in building up the monster, the film shifts gears in trying to portray the tragic nature of the monster's origins. But doing this in a matter of seconds, results in the audience not being able to sympathize with the monster. This change in gears not only results in the storyline but also the character, who become the focus of the film. Going into Hope and spending some time with the initial parts of the story, we expect the film to follow the journey of Ko Bum-seok and his team to safety. But suddenly we are shown the story of the monsters, in an incomplete manner. Imagine going into a Batman film, only to end up significantly going through the story of Joker's henchmen.

It is ironic that the film is titled Hope for the amount of absurdist comedy it is filled with. For example, we see four old fighters in the back of a small truck who pickup Ko Bum-seok, after he is stranded. While two of them are shooting and two of them are reloading, all of them still find time to chastize a much younger Ko Bum-seok for his inefficiency, still offering him something to eat. The cast carry this nature of the comedy that is propped up by a layer of human indifference within each character, resulting in more comedy and thrill.

Hope is a great example of a smart popcorn thriller. It entertains, thrills, amuses, and tries to tug at your emotions. It completely delves into each of the genres that the story is set in, without losing sight of each other. But tighter focus on the writing, could have resulted in a well-rounded film.