Hope Review: Nearly Great Until It Leaves Hope Harbor Behind

1 day ago

7 min read

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

Hope opened in U.S. theaters September 9 through Neon. This review is based on the U.S. theatrical cut screened at AMC.

Na Hong-jin has not directed a feature since The Wailing ten years ago. That is a long time to sit with high expectations. For roughly the first hour of Hope, I was ready to say the wait had been worth every day of it.

The movie is beautiful immediately. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, who also shot The Wailing, gives Hope Harbor the weight of a real place before anything arrives to tear it apart. The compositions are controlled without feeling stiff. The camera knows when to take in the entire village and when to stay close enough to catch somebody thinking, lying or realizing they may be completely screwed.

Hope Harbor is a remote South Korean fishing village near the DMZ, but the feeling is familiar. It has some Amity Island and Widow's Bay in its blood, along with every weather-beaten town sitting on a cold northeastern coastline where fishing, trade, gossip and old grudges keep the place alive. Everybody knows everybody. The police chief is not some distant authority. He is the guy people bother because a cow is dead in the road.

That cow has been ripped apart by something large enough to make the locals joke about a tiger wandering down from North Korea. Police chief Bum-seok sends his cousin Sung-ki and a group of hunters into the woods while he heads toward town. Communications are down, most outside help has been diverted to nearby wildfires and what begins as a strange animal attack starts getting much bigger.

Na lets it build.

The opening forty or fifty minutes, I did not have a watch on it, are as good as anything I have seen in a while. The movie takes time with the people, their work and the way they talk to one another. It does not treat characterization as dead space before the monster arrives. The character building is the suspense. We understand what this town feels like on a normal bad day, which is why it matters when something impossible comes through and makes the day considerably worse.

The dialogue may be the strongest part of the movie. It is funny, plainspoken and full of the interruptions, insults and unfinished thoughts that make people sound as if they knew each other before the screenplay started. The rhythm reminded me of good American small-town movies, not because these Korean characters have been flattened into Americans, but because Na understands the same basic truth. In a small town, affection and aggravation are usually sharing a cigarette.

People argue while working. They make jokes at the wrong time. They know exactly which nerve to hit because they have been hitting it for years. Even the exposition tends to arrive through personality instead of a character walking into a room and explaining the plot to the slowest person there. Considering how large and strange the movie eventually becomes, that grounding is not a small accomplishment.

Hwang Jung-min is outstanding as Bum-seok. He makes the police chief funny without turning him into a clown and frightened without turning him useless. Bum-seok begins as a recognizable small-town authority figure, cynical, foul-mouthed and comfortable enough in his position to seem half asleep inside it. Then he finds wrecked buildings, mangled bodies and vehicles being tossed around by something he cannot see.

Hwang plays the fear honestly. Bum-seok is not a movie cop who becomes an action hero the second danger appears. He looks overwhelmed because any sane person would be. He keeps moving anyway. That difference is where the performance gets its humanity, and much of its comedy. The jokes come from a real person trying to hold onto a normal reaction after normal has packed up and left town.

Hoyeon is also very good as the rookie officer Sung-ae. She gives Bum-seok somebody capable to work against and keeps the police side of the story from becoming a one-man panic attack. There are a lot of characters moving through this 157-minute movie, yet most of them register as people instead of future bodies. That matters once the creature begins cutting through them.

Eum Moon-suk nearly walks off with every scene he gets as Yang-bae, the town's offbeat carpenter. He is the sort of man who can turn a dead animal in a freezer into a business plan before anybody else has finished asking what it is. Every small town has some version of this guy. Maybe not with an alien corpse next to the frozen food, but close enough.

Then there is Zo In-sung as Sung-ki, Bum-seok's headstrong cousin and the hunter leading the men through the forest. Zo is good early, when Sung-ki still thinks he understands what he is tracking. He gets much better as that confidence is stripped away. By the final stretch he is outstanding, especially during the horseback action and the desperate fight through the woods. He sells the physical work, but more importantly, he sells how quickly bravery becomes survival when the hunter finally understands he is the smaller animal.

Michael Abels' score knows when to push and when to leave the village alone. It builds tension without announcing every incoming scare, then settles down long enough for the quieter character scenes to breathe. A lesser score would spend two and a half hours screaming that something terrible is nearby. Abels understands that calm can make the next burst of violence hit harder.

When the creature is finally revealed, the CGI works better than I expected. There are moments when its digital nature is obvious, but this is also a massive creature throwing cars and ripping through a town. At some point, I understand that a suit and a clever shadow are not going to do the entire job.

More importantly, Na and Hong build a physical world around it. The actors have wreckage to move through. The streets have weight. The camera gives us scale, geography and a believable sense of where the creature is in relation to the people trying not to die. Good visual effects are not only about the surface of the monster. They are about whether the rest of the scene convinces us it is there. For most of Hope, I believed it.

The first major attack is exciting because the movie has earned the chaos. It spent nearly an hour teaching us the shape of Hope Harbor, then lets the creature smash that shape apart. Cars fly. People fire at something they barely understand. Bum-seok scrambles through the damage. The action remains funny in places, but the humor does not cancel the danger. That balance is hard, and Na keeps it under control for an impressively long time.

The movie also understands that a monster story becomes less interesting if the creature exists only to be shot. The late revelation that Yang-bae killed an infant alien and stuffed it in his freezer reframes the destruction. The enormous creature was not randomly attacking the village. It was a mother looking for its child.

That is a good twist. It is cruel, sad and not entirely expected, at least not in the way Na delivers it. It forces the humans to reconsider the story they have been telling themselves. They thought an invading monster had attacked innocent people. In reality, human ignorance and greed started the bloodshed. The creature is still killing people, but the word monster suddenly has more than one address.

If Hope had stayed with that idea, this review probably would have a score beginning with an eight.

Instead, the final half hour begins dragging a different movie through the door. Sung-ae reveals that three more adult aliens are loose. Sung-ki and the hunters find a spacecraft filled with infant creatures. Another ship falls through a portal and crashes into a mountain. Then the film cuts to J'aur, an alien empress played by Alicia Vikander, and her bodyguard Ma'veyyo, played by Michael Fassbender. Ma'veyyo tears out his own beating heart as part of a plan to resurrect the dead child.

That is a lot of mythology to throw at us after more than two hours spent with a police chief, a hunter and a town trying to survive one creature.

The reversal itself is great. The expansion around it is where the movie loses me. Suddenly there are alien titles, royal relationships, new ships, new rules and a much broader cosmic story arriving just as the story I cared about should be coming to a close. It feels less like the end of Hope and more like the beginning of whatever movie might follow it.

The CGI also becomes more distracting during these final alien scenes. Earlier, the effects had a filthy physical world and frantic human behavior holding them in place. Here the imagery becomes cleaner, stranger and more sentimental. It reminded me of Avatar, and I do not mean that as a compliment. The grounded, funny creature movie gives way to earnest space opera in a hurry. Lord, we were doing so well.

There are still great moments in the final stretch. Sung-ki's horseback escape and his fight beside the police vehicle are huge, ridiculous and fun. Zo In-sung rises to the scale of it. Bum-seok and the remaining villagers still matter. The film does not completely abandon the people who got it there, and the mid-credits scene confirming Sung-ki survived gives the audience one welcome bit of relief.

But the emotional center has shifted. Hope Harbor stops feeling like the whole world and becomes one location in a larger alien story. Maybe that expansion is the point. Na has certainly made something ambitious enough to keep growing. I just liked the smaller movie more, even when that smaller movie included a giant creature throwing automobiles.

That frustration should not erase how much Hope gets right. Hong Kyung-pyo's cinematography is consistently beautiful. Michael Abels gives the film a patient, responsive score. The dialogue is funny and alive. Hwang Jung-min gives the movie a police chief worth following, Eum Moon-suk turns the village oddball into something memorable and Zo In-sung owns the late action.

For most of its runtime, Hope is a confident, character-driven monster movie that understands people are more interesting before the screaming starts. Its final turn does not ruin it. It does pull me away from the town, the people and the beautifully simple question that had carried the film: what happens when ordinary people encounter something too large and strange for their world?

The answer was already working. Then the movie looked toward the stars and started explaining the next question.

7.7/10