Hollywood polish, but much better.

Rating: 10/10 (7 September 2004)

This was far and away the best, the most powerful, the most moving war movie that I have ever seen, and I have seen quite a few of them. The only ones that come close are the great David Lean epics like Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia.
Those critics who have compared the movie to Hollywood efforts like The Deer Hunter and Saving Private Ryan could not be farther off the mark. Tae Guk Gi is what war is really about; those movies were not. War is not about endless, irrelevant, pointless games of Russian roulette, and it is not about top brass going all touchy-feely at the expense of their mission because one family seems to have paid too high a price for the war. It is about simple young men being swept up into desperate situations that they had nothing to do with creating, about the horrors they face and the horrible choices that they are often forced to make, and about survival.
The Deer Hunter's characters all seemed too old and jaded for their roles. They were not at all like the typical American rifleman in Vietnam who averaged 19.5 years of age and typically could not have found Vietnam on a map if his life depended upon it. I didn't care about any of that movie's characters. They might have possessed the requisite ignorance, but not the innocence. The characters in Private Ryan were all cardboard, with the possible exception of the reprehensible sniveling coward.
Not only was Tae Guk Gi ten times more moving on account of its realism and its character development, but it was a movie with several important moral messages, messages about which one can reflect for a very long time. The Deer Hunter seemed to me to be simply a slow, dull movie about some Pennsylvania blue-collar types that had very little to do with the real Vietnam, not at all like the French movie Indochine, for instance. I couldn't see the point of it. The only message that I saw in Private Ryan was an extremely pernicious one, that is, that war crimes are fine if Americans commit them against Germans.
Remember the episode of the captured German who is released because the patrol is behind enemy lines and they can't take him with them. The choice is to kill him or let him go. He begs his way out of getting shot and they release him. He ends up killing the main American hero in a gun fight after he, the German, has rejoined his unit. He gets captured again, and the coward then summons the "courage" to shoot the disarmed man dead in revenge, even though they are no longer behind enemy lines. The audience is supposed to be happy at this act of vengeance and to regret that the Americans didn't kill the stinking German when they had the chance, when, in fact, the German has behaved honorably throughout and has done nothing to "deserve" his fate. A movie like Saving Private Ryan could easily override any lectures on the Geneva Convention that a young American soldier might get in boot camp.
War crimes also occur in Tae Guk Gi--on both sides--as they did in that nasty internecine conflict known as the Korean War, but the victims are made real and the audience recoils in horror. Chalk up one important positive message.
Tae Guk Gi is also very instructive, not just about war in general, but also about the Korean War in particular. It does an amazing job of outlining the history of the war and capturing it as Koreans experienced it from a number of different angles. It also provides great insight into the strong bonds in a traditional Confucian Korean household, the sense of obligation felt by the oldest son, and the sacrifices that a family might make to advance the anointed intellectual "star" of the family, a carry-over from the Chinese scholar-official system.
One aspect of this family system gets lost in translation. Throughout the movie, in the English subtitles, the two brothers address one another by their respective given names. In fact, in the spoken Korean the younger one always calls his brother by an honorific expression that means "older brother." The nearly illiterate shoemaker might be the intellectual inferior of the star student, but he is, and will always remain, "older brother."
This truly great movie deserves that kind of respect, and I think it will get it as time passes.