A tragic story in Korea's war

Rating: 8/10 (24 October 2007)

The year is 1950, and we are introduced to a happy Korean family: Lee Jin-tae, the older brother who owns a small shoeshine stand in Seoul, his younger brother Lee Jin-seok, who is an excellent student and wants to go to the university,Jin tae's and Jin Seok's mother Yeong-ran Lee, Jin-tae's fiancée Young-shin and her little sisters. Everything goes fine with the family, who is poor, but very united: Jin-tae has plans to marry Young-shin, and he and his mother saves all their money to send Jin-seok to college. But when the Korea War starts and North Korea invades the South, The family see the need to abandon everything they own to try to join their uncle, in the country. The problem is that during their plan to scape, Jin-Seok's is forcibly conscripted into the South Korean army. Jin-tae tries to save him without any success, and then is also drafted into the army by his own wish, trying to protect his young brother. Without any kind of experience and few training, both brothers are sent to the front lines, where they witness the horrors of war. Jin-tae wants to release his brother, trying to be the best soldier and receive a medal of honor to send him back home. The problem is that many terrible things happens in a war, and even the brother's relationship becomes little by little to deteriorate.
''Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo'' is a sad and tragic story about North's and South's Korea war. I am not Korean, so I cannot say the general feeling that Korean people had when they watched this movie, or if everything was exactly how it happened, but in my personal opinion as an outsider, this movie is very good and well recreated, showing what I imagined when I read about the Korean war. (It cannot be a bad movie, if it became one of the biggest successes in Korean film history, eh?) I can only imagine how painful it was for brothers, sisters,mothers and fathers to be separated during and after the War, and watching movies like this one, makes you think about how pointless and horrible a war really is.