Underwhelming

Rating: 6/10 (22 February 2020)

I'm sure I'll get hated to the hill for this, but this wasn't a masterpiece. It was well acted, from what I could tell. Without knowing Korean, it's certainly possible I'm missing nuances of language that I correct in my own mind through the subtitles. I've seen others defending the second half of the movie, but that really is where it goes off the rails. We were enjoying it up until the party started. Then nothing makes much sense. It completely separates the plot into 2 distinct movies, the 2nd of which isn't that good. The movie explains most of its "nuance" and "message" with plot devices that work out "just right" to explain themselves. But they're just plot devices. And the end plays out as if we're supposed to be happy at the reunion? He killed someone that did nothing to him, except tell his own wife "he smells."
Snowpiercer and Train to Busan were better movies, tho they suffered from the same "poor ending" problem. But those endings were 5-10 minutes long, not 30. All in all, I really wanted to love this like everyone else does, but neither myself nor my wife did, come the end. I understand subtlety, but it really seems like people are digging so deep for it, that they're applying things that even the director never intended. Maybe that's the "abstract" nature of it, I'm not Roger Ebert.