Ahhhh- D-War, a film which has, to date, made so much money, it has become Korea's most successful film ever! Cha-chinging a very respectable 20.3$ million in its first five days over 689 cinema screen, it went to make a further $44 million in Korea, another $10 million in the world and grossing $5 million in USA on its' opening weekend.
However the reason why the hell D-War , a Z-Grade, painful exercise in non-involving movie making, is something I will never understand or at least hope to never understand. For I am sure if I figured it out, there'd be no saving me from this hell either.
You see ,. dear readers, I watched 'D-War' last weekend. All I knew about it was that:
1) There was a snake coiling around a building in the trailer which looked cool
2) My friend was really excited about it.
There may be one or two more little minor points that I perhaps somehow subconsciously were aware of but these did not play an important role in my approach to the movie.
Saturday Night; the height of the weekend. Dinner has been dealt with, a crap film watched to set the mood, the time for the most amazing, the pinnacle movie has come. Bear in mind that at this point I am an recovering man. A chest infection means I cough up damn near everything except blood and it feels as if I have chestburster playing fiddles with my rib, ribcage and lungs.
And then it starts : Within five minutes , I find myself in the company of the most inept, amateurish, illogical film I've seen for maybe the past five years.
I mean look here, i sit through everything and there are times at which i really would like to stop myself from ever having to see another film. But 'D-War' is beyond this. It is so spectacularly bad that it moves into a genre, a realm of its' own.
Point in question: The film has absolutely no idea what a linear structure is. In theory and on paper it follows a story from beginning to the end but it absolutely never adheres to any reason to explain the movement of the story. Near the end of the film the main character and the girl find themselves in what looks like a cheap-ass version of Mordor. And no one, not the bad guy, not Robert Forster, hell not even an ancient legend explains how the sweet Jesus they go from being in the city, getting knocked out and waking up in Mordor. No one even comments on it! Now I don't know you but if I was to get knocked out tonight on the 'Central Line' and wake up say in Tijuana in the middle of a drugs and prostitute shoot-out, i would not just assume that these things happen and join in. A person either needs to have been lobotomised or a heavy user of hallucinogenic drugs in order to be not to be shocked waking up in strange lands which they have never before encountered. But as I say, we don't really know whether the main guy is an addict or not so perhaps this is a subtle hint at the inhibition and danger-risk assessment destroying powers of drug addiction from director Shim Hyung-Rae
Point number two: Was this film written in Korean and then translated perhaps with the help of that unmistakeably intelligent and verbose and witty tool BabelFish? Because the film feels Korean, acts Korean , hell even the little humorous vignettes are Korean but goddammit it actually isn't. Maybe in the original language every word used was exposition and each syllable served a purpose, however listening to in English it is just non-sensical. i don't know about you but I did not see many movies where each dialogue made me more confused than the last. Someone, during the screening of 'Savage Grace' , complained about the banality of the dialogue there: well , he should see this! I'm sure he'd go back to 'Savage Grace' with new, deep, admiring feelings.
And I could go on: there are so many levels on which the film fails that it becomes a sort of sport spotting them. Even my friends were confused by the film's callous, innovative method of if it does not make sense then it must work - scenes following each other as they should but not together - as if a blind madman with a pair of scissors just attacked the 400 reels of film and whatever he cut they sellotaped together to create this film.
However credit where it's due as the CGI does not look atrociously bad - again none of it makes sense (why the hell do those soldiers suddenly appear at the cave? Why is Robert Forster a woman? why doesn't he just help them? Why does the bad guy look after Robert Forster's store when he can't find him? And perhaps the most amazing series of questions: Why does the lead keep abandoning his token best black friend? and why does the best friend keep coming back to help him? I'm sure there is some deep, homosexual , homoerotic, relationship twist there in the original language but once again BabelFish just loses it somewhere between helicopter and across the street.
That's not it. However I'm out of steam and out of breath. Do yourself a favor: miss this. Then i won't have to deal with your therapy later on.
Yours truly
Evrim Ersoy
Wednesday 21 November 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)