I had high hopes for Hope. After playing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, with a splashy Neon acquisition and a star-studded American crossover cast featuring Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender, all signs suggest that this South Korean sci-fi thriller would be something special. And unironically, Hope provided one of the most unique movie experiences of recent memory… for better AND for worse. What writer/director Na Hong-jin delivers is an explosive, bombastic, technically polished action spectacle that loses its way long before the credits roll.
The story follows a police chief named Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) in a small South Korean village that soon becomes terrorized by a giant alien monster. The alien creature is teased in classic Jaws/old school monster movie-fashion – hidden in the shadows, glimpsed near the end of the frame – before a massive full-frontal reveal comes with distinctly bad visual effects. We even meet a young rookie deputy named Sung-ae (Hoyeon), whose machine-gun/rocket-launcher hero moment instantly inserts itself into the conversation of best scenes of the year.
For the first hour, Hope works as a throwback to the big-budget disaster movies of the 2000s: scale and action over stakes, with basic characters and a basic narrative. It’s also handsomely made. Na favors smooth steadicam over shaky cam, and the sound mix is phenomenal. Everything up until this part is dynamic, explosive, and all around riveting, despite the creature’s lackluster CGI rendering.
Then the film keeps going. For Hope’s 2 hours and 37 minutes runtime, the film impressively pushes through its midpoint climax with relative ease. But all good will and momentum drains from the flick when we learn there is not one, not two, but THREE monsters running around that are basically unkillable. The script’s paper-thin plot structure collapses in record speed, resulting in an endless loop of repetitive action sequences.
The bigger problem is tone. Around the hour-and-a-half mark, Hope starts taking itself deadly seriously, adding mythology and asking for sympathy toward its aliens: 16-foot creatures played by Vikander, Fassbender, and Taylor Russell, who shift from humanoid to something dog-like when they run. In the final stretch, they converse in a made-up language whose subtitles read as gibberish, as if the filmmakers realized they had major talent playing CGI aliens and needed lines for them. It’s like Jurassic World pausing in its last fifteen minutes so the dinosaurs can discuss their feelings.
The film also has nothing to say. It isn’t a lean action movie, and it isn’t a heady Arrival-style story about aliens who come to help rather than harm. It does neither well. The title refers only to the setting, Hope Harbor, since nothing in the story involves saving anyone. It isn’t trippy or boldly experimental or arthouse, just weird and bad.
The action does have real pleasures: monsters barreling down streets, grenade launchers, car chases, a man firing a machine gun from a moving car, then firing a machine gun while riding horseback at full gallop. We love it. That’s the kind of action spectacle I live for. But too much of a good thing becomes tedious, and the poor CGI keeps the spectacle from ever feeling believable.
I can’t wholeheartedly recommend Hope. If you want a cheesy, two-and-a-half-hour monster movie and can ignore the effects, the thin story, and the absent characters, there’s fun to be had. I went in hoping for more, and what I got was a disappointment.
