Shifting Representations of the North
As a country with a violent and relatively short history, South Korea has produced a body of work that has frequently been colored by its politics and its national identity. Unsurprisingly, many of the most successful Korean films of all time hearken back to the event that created the modern nation in the first place, the Korean War (1950-53).
Korean War Films in the 20th Century: 1950s-90s
From the anti-communist dramas of the 1950s, to intimate rural dramas and eventually the large scale action extravaganzas of contemporary Korean cinema, the war has influenced many filmmakers in manifold ways over the years. And of course, while the Korean War officially ended in 1953 with an armistice, North and South Korea are still technically at war and many more smash hits of the modern age owe their success to the country’s perpetual fascination with tales concerning their northern neighbor: whether stories of soldiers along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) or of North Korean spies infiltrating the South.
The latest Korean War film to hit screens is
CHEON Sung-il’s
The Long Way Home, a big-budgeted action-comedy-drama featuring veteran name
SUL Kyung-gu and rising star
YEO Jin-gu as a South and North Korean soldier facing off on the western front. Though timed for the lucrative Chuseok holiday season, the film proved to be a rare dud for the genre, attracting only 564,122 viewers (USD 3.77 million) after ten days in theaters. Reviews were weak and competition was strong (it went up against the hit period drama
The Throne with
SONG Kang-ho and
YOO Ah-in), but perhaps that’s not the only reason it didn’t score with audiences.
Korean War films in the modern era generally fall into one of two categories, the sober (and melodramatic) action film or anything else, which includes dramas entertaining reunification or films avoiding North Korea altogether. Save for some notable exceptions, the former have scored with audiences while the latter have generally floundered, and The Long Way Home, though certainly an action title, falls in line more neatly with the less successful of the categories. But before going into the details of the modern Korean War film, it’s worth taking a step back to see how the genre has evolved since the beginning of the South Korean film industry.
Directly following the conflict, Korean War films were among the very first South Korean productions being made. With equipment borrowed from the American military, many anti-communist war dramas were produced, including the action film
Piagol (1955) and
KIM Ki-young’s first film
The Boxes of Death (1955).
Employing more sophistication during the Golden Era of the 1960s, filmmakers produced more layered and less partisan dramas focusing on tragedies stemming from the war. Yet censorship was never far away, as director
LEE Man-hee experienced when he was arrested for his sympathetic portrayal of communists in his 1965 film
The Seven Female POW’s. Echoing the government’s stance and its interference in the film industry, the state-sponsored Grand Bell Awards began to present an award to celebrate films with strong anti-communist leanings.
Two Faces of Korean War Films
A new benchmark was reached when the South Korean film industry experienced its boom in the late 1990s. Though set in modern times,
KANG Je-kyu’s
Swiri (1999), by presenting a sympathetic portrayal of North Korean soldiers, broke new ground for the industry and became the most successful film of all time in the process. Its record would last just a year, when it was broken by
PARK Chan-wook’s
Joint Security Area / JSA (2000), which featured an even more humanist approach to the portrayal of North Koreans on screen.
While neither of those were strictly Korean War films, it wouldn’t be long until one would soar to the top of the charts when KANG struck box office gold again with
TaeGukGi: Brotherhood Of War (2004), the tale of brothers separated during the war who end up fighting on separate sides, which became only the second Korean film to cross the ten million admissions mark, surpassing the benchmark set by
KANG Woo-suk’s
Silmido (2003), another North Korean-themed drama, just a month earlier.
Though nothing has come close to
TaeGukGi: Brotherhood Of War since, Korean War films with jingoistic themes have continued to perform well at the box office.
LEE John H’s
71-Into The Fire, a black and white portrayal of a squadron of youths going up against a cruel North Korean general who besieges them, went over three million admissions in 2010, while
JANG Hun’s
The Front Line, the tale of the back and forth conflict over the Aerok Hills which kept changing hands in the days leading up to the ceasefire, came just shy of the same mark a year later. Meanwhile, this summer
KIM Hak-soon’s
Northern Limit Line, the tale of the Second Battle Yeonpyeong, a modern naval skirmish between both powers which occurred during the 2002 World Cup, was a surprise smash with over six million viewers.
On the other side of the spectrum are the films that have kept their focus away from the battlefield. Among these was the smash hit
PARK Kwang-hyun’s
Welcome To Dongmakgol (produced and written by
JANG Jin), a hit with over eight million admissions in 2005, which featured small squadrons from South and North Korea stranded in a village so remote that its inhabitants aren’t even aware of the conflict surrounding them. However, other films have not fared anywhere near as well, such as
YI Sang-woo’s
A Little Pond (2009), an emotional tale about the massacre of South Korean refugees, with no discernible North Korean element, by the US military which floundered with less than 50,000 admissions, and the rural comedy-drama
In Love And the War (2011), imagining co-existence between North Korean soldiers and South Korean villagers, which finished its run below 250,000 viewers.
While films with patriotic leanings have generally succeeded at the box office (as recently as the all time record-breaking run of last year’s
Roaring Currents), those navigating the trickier path of positive North Korean representations or daring to entertain a rapprochement between both nations, have had a rockier time at the box office, and
The Long Way Home, the latest film to join this Korean War genre, appears to have been the most recent casualty of this phenomenon. Yet, this setback aside, time will surely afford us another smash hit Korean War film before long.