Hope

Last night I went back to the Broadway (my happy place) to see Hope, a movie I have been anticipating ever since it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, and it is absolutely wild!  When Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) and a group of his friends discover a bull that was killed by an unusually large but unknown predator in the middle of the road, he calls his cousin Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the police chief of the small South Korean village of Hope Harbor, to investigate.  The young men think it might be a tiger so Bum-seok sends them into the nearby forest to search while he investigates the village.  He discovers more dead livestock and several dead people before he sees that something large has rampaged through the streets.  As he slowly walks through the carnage, he encounters several people, including a retired colonel named Ahn Nak-yeon (Lee Sang-hee), who have survived attacks by a large and seemingly indestructible creature until he, too, is pursued by it.  He and Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), a rookie on the police force, are eventually able to kill the creature and, in the aftermath, they learn why it attacked the village and that there are more of them in the forest.  Meanwhile, Sung-ki and his friends discover what the creatures are (sort of) but they are attacked until only he is left alive.  Bum-seok, Nak-yeon, and Sung-ae rush to the forest to rescue Sung-ki which leads to an epic show-down (sort of).  I found this a bit confounding but it hardly matters because it is just so entertaining.  The tension builds and builds with the creature always one step ahead of Bum-soek as he tracks it through the streets and it is almost unbearable because you only see the devastating effects of the creature rather than the creature itself for almost an hour of the runtime (the camera work in these scenes is brilliant).  The action sequences are an absolute adrenaline rush and I was holding my breath during several thrilling high speed car chases and an equally thrilling chase on horseback through the forest.  The creatures, portrayed by Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell, and Cameron Britton, look great but the CGI is sometimes really wonky when they move and, because they are so much larger than the humans, the perspective is weirdly skewed and the distance between them is frequently off during the chases.  A lot of the dark comedy, which did make me laugh out loud (I especially enjoyed a running joke in which Bum-seok questions where everyone got the guns they are using), is sometimes really jarring in the middle of all of the destruction and the pacing grinds to a halt in the second act with unnecessary and lengthy scenes.  Finally, all of the spectacle is ultimately meaningless because we know so little about the creatures and their motivation and, just when we start to learn something, the screen goes to black (I was actually shocked when it ended and I was not alone judging from the response of my audience).  However, I have to say that I had a lot of fun watching this because it is so completely bonkers and I think people will either love it or hate it!