It can't have gone unnoticed by fans of this decade's Korean movies, that the filmmakers are tremendously influenced by Hollywood's last "golden era," the 1970s.
Apparently, however, it isn't just the auteur ethic and the transgressive freedom with sex and violence they've absorbed, in movies such as Oldboy and 3-Iron.
Let some Koreans channel their inner-Peckinpahs and Scorseses. Others, like Haeundae director Je-gyun Yun, has embraced the cheesy '70s oeuvre of the late "Master of Disaster" Irwin Allen (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure), and has made what has been dubbed "Korea's first disaster movie," straight from his playbook, and one of the country's biggest box-office hits.
The disaster: A mega-tsunami, 100 metres high from a perfect-storm combination of an earthquake and typhoon that causes an entire island off Korea to sink.
Ground zero: The sunny resort town of Haeundae, which on an in-season weekend, can see as many as a million young Koreans sunning themselves on its beach.
OK, initiate template programming. Like a Love Boat episode with a body count, an Irwin-Allenesque disaster film must open with an hour of soap opera, interspersed with hints of Armageddon to come.
Indeed, Haeundae opens in the midst of the 2004 tsunami, aboard a Korean fishing vessel where one crewman lies pinned under a fishing cage. U.S. evac helicopters hover overhead, and Man-sik (Kyung-gu Sol) promises the dying man he will look after his teenage daughter Yeon-hee back home in Haeundae.
Five years later, we meet Kim Hwi (Joong-Hoon Park) a geologist who has given up his marriage and daughter to his career, and who has been keeping track of incremental tremors similar to 2004. Something big looks like it's about to happen, but no one will believe him.
And no wonder. Quadrillions of won (Korean bucks) are at stake with a seaside mall that crass "Uncle" (Jae-ho Song) is trying to sell to "suits" from Seoul (shades of Jaws, where intimations of disaster are quelled because they'd be bad for business).
Man-sik is sick in love with the mischievous Yeon-hee (Ji-won Ha) and vice-versa. But a dark secret about her father's death stands between them.
There's also Man-sik's brother Hyeong-sik, a coast guard rescuer, who saves the life of a rich, arrogant college girl from Seoul named Hee-mi (Ye-won Kang) -- by knocking her out so she doesn't kill them both with her flailing.
At first threatening to sue him, she contents herself with becoming a pain in his side and then a tease. Their relationship is the dramatic saving grace of the movie, full of slapstick comedy and Romeo and Juliet pathos, Korean style.
OK, you're saying, but what about the tsunami? Is it worth waiting an hour for? Well, okay, yeah. It meets, say, Roland Emmerich standards, with buildings toppling over and even a giant freighter being washed up like an upright whale.
Of course, a movie like this would be disappointing if it didn't strain credulity eight different ways. For example, despite the wave ostensibly moving at 400 km/h, some people on the beach are able to spot it and ostensibly outrun it. There are also a few red-herring Titanic I-love-you-goodbye moments (and one actual one) with our various young lovers.
Haeundae is a cheesily melodramatic popcorn movie that plays best if -- unlike us wei-guks (Westerners) -- you haven't seen it played out a hundred times before.
(This film is rated 14-A)
More Movie Reviews
