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July 27, 2004 INTRODUCTION Taegukgi starts in present day, when a team of people in South Korea dig up skeletons and other material from the Korean War. When a pen is discovered with the carved words "Jin-seok" on it , the workers at the site supposes it is the dead pen-owner's name. But when they check the name in the computer, they discover that Jin-seok is still alive. They then call the aged and retired soldier, and ask him to come over to the site to pick up the pen. During their conversation, Jin-seok mentions a "Jin-tae". We soon discover that Jin-tae is Jin-seok's brother. Via a flashback, we go back to 1950, when the Korean War breaks out. Jin-seok (Won Bin) is forced by some soldiers to enter the South Korean military. Afraid that his brother might get hurt, Jin-tae (Jang Dong-kun) joins the army too. But when Jin-tae kills people ruthlessly in order to get an award that gives him the right to send Jin-seok out of camp, Jin-seok starts to hate his brother... REVIEW After finding out it became the highest-grossing domestic film in South Korea and watching its extremely powerful and touching theatrical trailer, I decided to give Taegukgi a try. Before watching this film, I had only watched one South Korean movie: 2001's hilarious My Sassy Girl, and it was even dubbed in Chinese. Taegukgi was my first South Korean film that I watched entirely in the language. To my surprise, it was not too hard for me by plainly looking at the subtitles to understand what the characters were doing. Taegukgi is a very touching film, as it describes Jin-tae and Jin-seok's brotherhood pretty well, which is rare because films like these usually focuses on its visuals than emotions. It also reflects how bad the North Koreans are, which explains why the film was so extremely successful in its production country. Almost the entire film is presented in a grayish palette, which is appropriate because it displays the sad mood the soldiers have. In other terms, The war scenes, especially the ones with explosions, were very realistic. When some of the soldiers got their limbs ripped off during the process, it reminded me of Saving Private Ryan. But, of course there were some problems in the film. First, there were too many war sequences. I think they should have cut a few useless scenes except for some that were important to the plot. And what's worse, the war scenes were not well done, too. Obviously, the person behind the camera was not experienced enough. The camera moved back and forth frequently, which made me dizzy. Also, there was one minor contradiction in the movie too. Overall, Taegukgi was quite entertaining. Its war scenes are very realistic, although the camera was not controlled well; and its description of brotherhood is very touching, complete with a powerful ending. Though it never pares up to war epics such as Saving Private Ryan, Taegukgi is a worth-watching film that I recommend.
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