Why don’t more international auteurs make break-neck action flicks? OK, so maybe offering someone with an eclectic world view a big pile of cash to film huge explosions might be incredibly risky when it comes to making some of that money back (the world still remembers David Lynch’s Dune), but sci-fi/action movies would certainly be more interesting if that was the case.
Proving my point wildly is Na Hong-jin’s Hope, a barnstorming, non-stop, sci-fi actioner that’s apparently the most expensive film in Korean history, and sees the filmmaker make a bizarre leap from ruthlessly down-beat crime and horror films to an insane, all-action, alien invasion flick. However, before your brain immediately goes to such sizable, American epics such as Independence Day or Skyline, the director reliably delivers something utterly unexpected that is both unfeasibly weird and utterly exhilarating. Are there flaws? Oh God, yes – but as you work your way through Hope’s gargantuan running time, you start to wonder if Na isn’t using such a sizable canvas to take the piss a little.
As the police chief of Hope Harbour, Ko Bum-seok strives to keep his community safe as it sits near the Korean demilitarised zone – however, he’s constantly exasperated by the fact that many villagers refuse to treat him with the respect he feels he deserves. Take the discovery of a dead cow with gaping wounds that’s been discovered by a group of hunters who jokingly try to convince Bum-seok that it had to be a tiger that was responsible. However, while both the police chief, and his second cousin Ko Sung-ki, agree to disagree and move on, something incredibly destructive is happening back in the heart of the village.
Some sort of large creature has embarked on a rampage throughout Hope, trashing property and slaughtering large swathes of the elderly population as it goes and as Bum-seok follows it’s sizable trail of destruction he sees that even with aid from retired colonel Ahn Nak-yeon and gutsy rookie, Im Sung-ae, the beast is virtually impossible to kill, no matter how many bullets they pump into the thing during a high speed chase.
In The aftermath, Bum-seok has to take stock of some horrific errors he made during the rampage, but while the wrecked village picks itself up and tends to its wounded, news gets out that this ordeal might not yet be over. Discovering this the hard way is Ko Sung-ki and his hunting party, who find out that the marauding creature was not only an alien, but is part of a family of similarly indestructible extraterrestrials who have a sizable bone to pick with any soft, squishy humans who wander within their path.
But when Bum-seok and Sung-ae discover what the aliens want, a mad chase for survival begins that subbonly refuses to slow down and may, in fact, have no end…
So, remember when I said earlier on that I believe that Na Hong-jin was using Hope to take the piss, well I genuinely believe that the director of this willfully odd, occasionally baffling movie, is using this action-packed extravaganza to poke fun at similar-sized American films. Think of the way that Paul Verhoven satirised the way American’s portrayed violence in Robocop and you get the suspicion that Na is gleefully sending up the various excesses you’d find in a Michael Bay Transformers sequel, by including bloated, never-ending action sequences, confounding side characters who insist on hijacking the plot for comedic reasons, and a noticable unwillingness to to serve up an actual ending just in case the sequel Gods come a-knocking. Obviously, if you’re not in on the joke, Hope still absolutely fucking rocks, but there’s also a chance that you may miss the fact that some of those glaring issues are actually mocking the genre, while simultaneously enforcing it.
For a start, the biggest hurdle to cross is the fact that for all of its undoubtable virtues, Hope still deploys some of the worst CGI I’ve seen in quite a while. In fact, all joking aside, you have to get yourself into a fairly forgiving mindset to push past the worst of it as we’re treated to various shots that probably wouldn’t have been acceptable in the 2000s, let alone in 2026. Anything that’s rendered in slow motion or anything that requires the camera to track anything that’s moving fast usually involves looking at a wince-inducing visual effect; but while it’s easy to be a CGI snob in these picky times, to dismiss it is to deny some of the most crazy, high-ocane action we’ve seen all year. However, to enjoy that, you also have to contend with the fact that even after 157 minutes of unbridled lunacy, Na Hong-jin has the brass balls to end things on a fucking cliffhanger. Genuine sequel hopes, or yet more satirical mischief – I actually get the feeling that it’s probably both.
However, with these issues broached, we can get down to business and the main takeaway from Hope is that Na is having so much fun, it ends up being incredibly infectious. Peppering the movie with truly epic chase sequences, the film has no real interest in building up much real plot other than the fact that three-meter aliens are tearing up a small Korean village. A drawn-out foot chase through a wrecked Hope Harbour somehow picks up even more pace when Hwang Jung-min’s out of his depth police chief is joined by Hoyeon’s scene stealing rookie and the already long sequence switches into a frenzied car chase. Later still, Zo In-sung’s determined hunter finds himself fleeing through the forest from speedy, inhuman assailants only for us to discover that he seems to be just as cartoonishly resistant to death as the alien beasts he’s trying to escape.
It’s here that Na deploys his second greatest weapon after the superlative, all-or-nothing action – a raft of eccentric characters who seem to have wandered out of a Coen Brothers, or a Bong Joon Ho film. Be it Bum-seok constantly trying to take control of a situation that’s utterly beyond him, the old man who keeps steering a conversation about an alien sighting about the gastric distress he was experiencing at the time, or the fact that a pair of the extraterrestrials are being mo-capped by none other than real-life spouses Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, the movie constantly wrong-foots you to keep things completely unpredictable. This, combined with the truly insane action, makes Hope such a rewarding and amusing experience. Simply put, Na Hong-jin has possibly given us the greatest 150 minute movie with bad CGI and no ending that you’ll ever see… and it’s glorious.
While some will undoubtedly find Hope’s more esoteric leanings more frustrating than fun (seriously, that CGI is going to be a sizable deal breaker for many), those on Na Hong-jin’s wavelength will discover a space oddity quite unlike any other. Should there actually be a sequel, then maybe a sizable amount of those deliberate question marks might be cleaned up. But if it turns out that Na’s been trolling us all along, here’s hoping that most get the joke.
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