Monster movies, when they run two hours and 40 minutes, are usually bogged down by a whole heap of character backstory. Think about all the tedious human drama that always got crammed into your typical Roland Emmerich blockbuster. Well, it turns out that this is more than filler; it provides necessary breathing room to the action. Necessary breathing room that the new Korean film Hope does not possess.

Hope, from acclaimed South Korean director Na Hong-in (The Chaser, The Wailing), has been billed as the most expensive Korean film of all time, and it arrives in Australia with a very limited number of IMAX screenings. Although images are readily available, this review won’t include any. The trailers skirt around showing too closely the monster that’s laying waste to a number of remote Korean villages and their denizens, which is to a purpose, because the movie itself does not go there for at least 40 minutes. That’s a bit like Jaws, where the point was to build suspense to the reveal, and to be sure, the monster reveal in Hope is unexpected to say the least. However, in Jaws it was also because the animatronic shark didn’t look all that good, and even with all the money they poured into Hope, there are some issues with the creature effects here too.

Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) serves as chief of police in Hope Harbour, a region near the demilitarised zone that’s been cut off due to wildfires. He’s first alerted to something being amiss from the corpse of a cowing lying in the road. This cow didn’t just keel over in its spot due to old age. No, it’s got giant claw marks rending its flesh, and even though a group of local hunters theorises that it could be a tiger, their better judgment tells them this is outside what a tiger could or would do.

They start to get a better idea what they’re up against upon following gun shots and sounds of chaotic destruction to a village strewn with bodies, where this menace has overturned every free-standing object, vendor cart or means of mechanised transportation in the area. When an actual car comes hurtling down the street at Ko, the tiger theory goes out the window, and reinforcements will be needed to prevent the same thing from happening to whatever villages in the area have not yet fallen victim.

If that synopsis shows a notable disregard for the family of this police officer, for anything but the most superficial layers of his relationship to the other police officers who arrive on the scene, and anything about the hunters beyond their theories of what this thing might be, that’s because Hope has little interest in any of this stuff. It’s here for the hurtled cars and general mayhem, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily great at rendering it.

To be sure, there’s a sense of a Godzilla movie here, even though the creature itself is nothing like Godzilla, and that’s all we’ll say about that. The anticipation of what this is going to be is sustaining, and the reveal is pretty good, too, if only for how unexpected it is.

But the effects just aren’t totally up to snuff. In certain moments and at certain angles, the creature is close to the fulfilment of our contemporary hopes for monsters in a monster movie. Other times, though, it has a bit of a skittering quality, crashing through the streets not because it is moving too fast or naturally unstable on its feet, but because something about the graphics themselves feels skittery. There are times when it feels like a two-dimensional image rather than a creature occupying space and containing weight.

But we could live with these things if there just weren’t so much of it. You can watch 160 minutes of Hope, being basically engaged in the moment, without really being able to go back and diagram how so much screen time was expended with so little in the way of narrative developments. There are measures and countermeasures in escaping/fighting the threat, and there are semi-awkward bits of comedy shoehorned in. Each unto itself is a compelling set piece, but the reason they call them set pieces is that they go on for about three to five minutes before some narrative downtime. In Hope, there isn’t much in the way of narrative downtime.

Yet Hope is still good because of something fundamentally odd and new about the creature that we’ve teased but cannot spoil. Also beyond the scope of our spoilers? How Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender, the A-list actors who make a real-life couple, factor into the proceedings. All will be revealed. Eventually.

Before then, there are a lot of thrown vehicles (a bicycle has a memorable moment), gashes in the sides of farm animals, car chases, large weaponry, humans themselves used as weapons, and general chaos. It’s enough to make Hope a worthwhile and entertaining curiosity if not a new classic in the genre.

 

Hope is currently playing in Australian cinemas.