Good and Bad

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2008)

As others have duly noted  and it's a point I'll try not to belabour  Brotherhood is clearly influenced by Saving Private Ryan and, while at times its ferocious battle scenes surpass even the equivalent scenes that shocked us all so much back in '98, overall I don't believe Je-gyu Kang has succeeded in the way that Spielberg did.
Brotherhood is really two films in one. Separate the battle scenes from everything else and you have one very good film and one very bad. The brothers' everyday life prior to being essentially press-ganged into the South Korean army is shamefully over-sentimentalised, and the overwrought departure scene in which their mother tearfully chases their train as they head for battle is something that even Griffith might have though twice about back in 1916.
The battle scenes are powerful stuff though, planting the viewer right in the thick of the action and creating a violently deranged landscape that reeks with the stench of spilled guts, blood, severed limbs and gunpowder. That one brother can repeatedly skip unharmed past a heavy barrage of bombs, guns and bayonets
in his pursuit of the medal of honour he believes will return his brother to the safety of their mother's bosom is just one of a number of inconsistencies that we have to swallow in the midst of these insane conflicts.
Although they are good, the battle scenes number too many so that, despite their rawness, a kind of insensitivity begins to set in. Everything  even the most incredible  becomes ordinary if you're exposed to it too often, and that's what happens here. As a result, the story has to fall back on the (weaker) strand of the decaying relationship between the two brothers and, at times, the conversations between them descend into overwrought melodrama. In this respect, it's difficult to understand who would be entirely satisfied with what we have here (although its rating on this site suggests most would disagree): fans of bloody war films will be dismayed by the regular injections of sentimentality and overwrought emotion while those looking for some depth to the brothers' relationship and the stresses placed upon it by the extremest of situations will also come away feeling short-changed.