A Korean Private Ryan to savour

Rating: 7/10 (23 December 2004)

Taegukgi Hwinalrimyeo (aka The Brotherhood of War) is the most expensive film ever made in Korea and the biggest home hit this year. It is directed and written by Kang je-gyu whom some dub the 'Spielberg of South Korea', and indeed his film has a framing device which is very Private Ryan-ish, and although most of the ensuing film is concerned with the reuniting of a family, it is to a different point. One suspects that home audiences are less concerned by this indebtedness than Western ones might be. The film uses the 'two brothers go to war' storyline, but the peculiar nature of the North-South conflict ultimately gives the family dilemma a wider meaning, their travails reflecting the national estrangement and the recovery of the missing - a thematic reference growing as common in Korean films as is the shadow of nuclear disaster in Japanese.
Taegukgi contains very violent, extended war scenes full of those realistic effects which marked out Private Ryan, and has a similar epic feel. Its well shot and, even at 160 mins, (Director's Cut length: a shorter single disc DVD set is also available) never boring. However the film suffers rather from a melodramatic storyline, elements of which seems too contrived to entirely convince, including some amusingly telegraphed business (e.g Enemy commander in HQ bunker, by which the hero is waiting and listening, having fought his way through the lines heard shouting : "Men! If they succeed in taking this bunker then we are all finished!") and hoary clichés like the extended train-side farewell, participants running down the station platform to say a tearful goodbye and all. In contrast, one or two other moments were very moving (one standout is the climactic reunion sequence) and the extended, successful staging of the action scenes, full of devastating modern effects, will make this viewer revisit it again soon. Not among the very greatest war films, principally because of these plot weaknesses, and its sentimentality, even if it makes a brave try - but well worth seeing and I think is still the best war film of 2004.