Cast: Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander Review by Carol Allen
The story begins in a once quiet little town called Hope Harbour, where the police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) has been alerted by some local hunters, who have found a strangely mutilated dead bull in the nearby countryside. Their leader Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) thinks it might be the work of a tiger that’s found its way down from Siberia. Bum-seok looks sceptical.
The hunters however go off into the forest on a possible tiger hunt, Bum-seaok goes back to town, where he finds total chaos and destruction caused, he’s told, by a monster on the rampage. It’s certainly done plenty of damage to property and to people. Bum-Seok is assisted in his investigation by his second in command, Sung-ae (Hoyeon), a feisty female officer who’s a match for any man or monster. It’s some way in before we actually meet the monster, who turns out to be a humanoid giant which destroys any object or person that gets in its path. And that’s just for starters.
While the two cops with the help of a local scientist try to perform a post mortem on the now dead monster, over in the forest Sung-I and his band of hunters are beginning to realise they are not alone. And the entity that’s chasing them, rather than them chasing it, ain’t no Siberian tiger. It’s come from a lot further than Siberia. The special effects of what turn out to be lethal, shape shifting aliens are very impressive. To tell you more would spoil the fun, as would letting you know what those two well known Western actors are doing in a Korean sci fi flick.
At two hours forty minutes this is a long sit down – the film could have done with a bit of trimming in the first act. But once we get down to the meat of the story, as it were, it never lets up. It also takes a bit of a risk in that Bum-seok the policeman is not a very likeable character. He’s bit of a bully and not very heroic. His female sidekick however is. She also has one of the funniest scenes in the film, when an elderly man who has seen one of the aliens, is telling her in great and intimate detail of how it affected him. It’s the longest and funniest description of an attack of diarrhea I’ve ever heard in a film or indeed read in a novel! The hunters in the forest do some great horse riding – I was fearful one of the horses might meet the same fate as that bull at the beginning – and Sung-ki gets to show himself as a real hero, particularly in the long, inventive and never letting up chase sequence which is the climax of the film.
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