‘HOPE’ Goes Berserk, But Better Hope for a Sequel

Hope – writer-director-producer Na Hong-jin’s Korean alien invasion action thriller that debuted at Cannes earlier this year before being picked up by NEON for local distribution – is directed to within an inch of its life. For nearly its entire two-and-a-half-hour runtime, the thing is alive, kinetic, and moving at breakneck speed, piling one brilliantly choreographed set piece on top of the next without losing the slapstick sensibility underscoring it all. There are giant, cheetah-fast alien predators capable of tearing people apart, yet half the time they somehow can’t quite catch a man on horseback. Or swipe at one of our protagonists only to miss by inches, over and over again. Getting hung up on the over-the-top preposterousness of it all would be missing the point. There’s such a sense of momentum and fun to the whole enterprise that the only real option is to let Hope overwhelm you and roll with its super-strength punches.

Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the hapless but self-serious police chief of Hope Harbor, a little village on the outskirts of the Korean DMZ, is called in by his hunter cousin Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) to inspect a mauled cow lying in the middle of the road. The bovine victim has gashes across its torso far too large to be the work of a local bear. One of Sung-ki’s compatriots suggests it could be a roaming tiger. “Are there local tigers?” Bum-seok wonders, cluelessly, as we increasingly come to know him. We discerning audience members know something considerably larger and more nefarious than a terrestrial predator is afoot. While the hunters attempt to track the oversized beast back to wherever it came from, Bum-seok rallies whatever troops he can muster to defend his little town.

Soon enough, the monster is wreaking havoc on Hope Harbor, gutting the village and absolutely obliterating its mostly elderly citizenry. By the time Bum-seok returns, the town is already in tatters. Ravaged bodies and assorted body parts line the streets. Blood paints many a surface. Fortunately, living near the DMZ has made the locals a little paranoid and gun-nutty by nature, so Hope Harbor is armed to the teeth with shotguns, M-16s, and rocket launchers. What doesn’t fend off Kim Jong Un will apparently have to do for an alien invasion. While the chief tries to gather his courage, local militias ride guns blazing into the streets to handle the problem themselves.

This first major assault is also where Hope announces just how different it is than the sci-fi blockbusters Hollywood regularly churns out. Hollywood logic typically tells you to save the really big shit for the finale. Na Hong-jin pretty much blows the doors off the thing immediately. The town is already being ripped apart early, the monsters are already fully visible, and the movie keeps finding new levels of escalation rather than treating the first act like foreplay for a long-delayed effects reel (already showcased in the trailer!) at the end. It goes balls to the wall early and often.

A lot of what makes that work feels distinctly Korean. The action can be genuinely badass without requiring its characters to behave like badasses at all times. Bum-seok is constantly being one-upped by regular townsfolk, made to look like a fool every time somebody pulls out a bigger weapon. “Where did you get that?” he asks. “We’ll talk about it later.” The supposedly most qualified person in the room is frequently the least effective, bumbling through the chaos and proving a worse shot than basically everyone around him.

Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), the female officer supporting him, is considerably more capable, but even she exists within a movie where surviving a giant alien attack mostly involves regular people fumbling, panicking, getting lucky, occasionally rising to the occasion and – quite possibly – dying anyway. There’s a pretty funny commentary buried in there about public servants getting in the way while ordinary citizens simply take care of business themselves, and it’s baked into why the action always feels human even as it becomes increasingly extraterrestrial. Hope is very funny, often laugh-out-loud funny, without treating the monster violence itself like a joke.

Pretty much none of these characters are enormously fleshed out. Unless they’re being literally torn to flesh that is. It would be difficult to list more than a trait or relationship for most of them, but they don’t really need much more. We learn who people are through what they do, which is how a good action movie should convey characterization anyway. Who runs toward danger. Who hides behind cover. Who keeps firing. Who proves catastrophically useless when danger arrives. Those simple choices communicate everything the movie needs us to know. Nobody requires a fifteen-minute childhood monologue for us to understand that they probably don’t want to be eviscerated by a goopy monster alien.

The world around them receives considerably more attention. The production design is insane, a cluttered, lived-in cacophony of unrest and destruction that makes it feel as though an entire town has genuinely been ripped apart. Keeping so much of the action at street level means the devastation is never some indistinct CGI skyline collapsing several miles behind the characters. We’re constantly moving through wrecked storefronts, overturned vehicles, debris, little fires, and chunks of people decorating the pavement. It also feels specifically Korean rather than like some anonymous Hollywood apocalypse dropped onto a foreign location, from the wares spilling out of destroyed shops to the genuinely tasty-looking meals the monster hunters literally inhale whenever they get a moment to recoup.

The creatures themselves land somewhere between A Quiet Place and Avatar, all thick carapace, lanky jointed limbs, and impossible speed. They’re ugly, nasty things but also clearly more than the oversized killing machines they initially appear to be, and Hope starts peeling back just enough about what they are and why they’ve arrived to make the mythology compelling. Unfortunately, we only really begin tucking into those questions shortly before the movie ends.

When used, the practical effects are outstanding, while the CGI generally looks much better than expected from a production without the resources of a $200 million Hollywood blockbuster, a small army of visual-effects houses, and two years of post-production. More importantly, the movie actually shows the monsters. A lot. There’s no hiding one in the fog for 90 minutes because somebody knows the model falls apart in daylight. Hope plants these things front and center and builds extended action around them. Do they look perfect? No. But the movie is moving so quickly and the action itself is so much cleaner and better constructed than the average effects-heavy blockbuster that there’s very little impulse to dispel the illusion because of pixel count.

It’s not particularly scary, though it gets plenty gnarly. People are ripped apart, bodies scattered through streets, and gore punctuates the action without overwhelming the movie’s playful streak. Na has somehow found a tonal sweet spot where slapstick comedy can exist right alongside hideous alien mutilation without either one completely overwheling the other.

Where Hope gets into problems is that all this forward movement never quite arrives anywhere. The movie keeps turning corners and discovering bigger corridors, then opening another door only to reveal an even bigger corridor behind it. Its mythology expands and expands until, rather abruptly, the movie simply ends. And this isn’t merely one of those “the adventure continues” endings where the main story concludes and somebody tosses a sequel hook on top. It is a blatant cliffhanger. The larger alien story remains unresolved, our surviving townspeople are still very much in the middle of things, and only in the closing stretch do we finally gain a clearer understanding of the extraterrestrials themselves and the much larger hierarchy behind them.

Writer-director-producer Na Hong-jin has apparently already completed a script for the sequel, which is reassuring because anyone who watches Hope will immediately understand how badly one is needed. But it’s also frustrating that a movie this long and this accomplished at sustaining its own momentum ultimately feels like the opening movement of something larger rather than a fully satisfying object unto itself. Two and a half hours is a lot of runway to end by effectively saying, “OK, now we’re getting started.”

And that’s the weird contradiction of Hope. For two and a half hours, it absolutely rips. The direction is berserk, the production design is spectacular, the monsters tear up the screen, the action rarely lets up, and the willingness to make the people facing their annihilation look like fumbling idiots gives the whole thing a distinct personality that separates it from stoic sci-fi actioners and solemn creature features. Then the credits arrive and suddenly all that momentum has nowhere to go. Hope rules. But you better hope for that sequel if you want anything resembling a payoff.

CONCLUSION: An absolutely ripping sci-fi actioner that outclasses Hollywood by nearly every measure, ‘Hope’ is 156 minutes of sustained escalation that just keeps getting wilder and wilder and then…ends abruptly. It doesn’t just ask for a sequel, it outright demands one: all setup with very little payoff. But man, what a rip-roaring calling card for the muscular direction of Na Hong-jin.