Worth a watch for war movie fans - and those starved for Korean cinema

Rating: 7/10 (22 February 2005)

A nice stab at making both an allegory and historical retrospective of the war in Korea.
The story itself is wholly unbelievable, e.g. that two brothers would be pivotal characters in every phase of a three year conflict is a Forest Gump like stretch  (an American equivalent would be to be at Pearl Harbor, Land in Normandy, survive the Battle of the Bulge, and then raise the flag on mount Surabachi ) but it has enough realistic detail so as to keep the viewers attention, and a compelling enough, though simplistic story.
War bad.
Not everything the ROK did during its war was admirable.
Brotherhood transcends politics, sometimes good people do evil things for good reasons.
Acting seemed very melodramatic, and dated  but I can't speak Korean, though given what little technical terms I recognized, the Korean translator didn't have much of a colloquial grasp of English either.
Great art direction. Hokey "Sands of Iwo Jima" like battle sequences with plenty of gore.
I give it a 7/10