Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo

Rating: 6/10 (19 August 2007)

East Asian cinema is famous for its big share of over-the-top emotion. Everything has to be extremely dramatized (Of course not everything, but if you look at the overall average, it applies). This kind of film-making brought us masterpieces, but it can also be too much sometimes, given that many moviegoers are rather inexperienced concerning Asian cinema. I was a little bit distracted by this in Je-gyu Kang's "Taegukgi hwinalrimyeu", because it made this otherwise very realistic film a bit unrealistic. That's a general problem, that I think this story would have been better material for an opera. The characters are given clear qualities, there are enough conflicts between them to keep the viewer interested a running time of 143 minutes. The sequence of the film I remember the most is when the South Korean "traitors" were mass executed. It just felt like another form of violence than in the rest of the movie. In the end, the whole film didn't capture me, because it was too loud when subtlety would have been more effective.