Went to the NYAFF centerpiece screening of Na Hong-jin's latest film HOPE and I am left wondering why everyone is so madly in love with it.
The film has a couple of cops trying to stop the monsters that are laying waste to their town
There are moments that make you go "WHOA!" but much of the film was a tough slog that had me pulling out my note book and simply write a series of questions punctuated by statements of all the things that made no sense (I won't list them, but its pretty much everything). The worst offender is that destruction doesn't look monster made but looks like just a decaying places. I kept wondering if there are ghost towns in Korea because they look terrible and there was no signs of anyone of really being there for years. I always pick on zombie films about that, but this film has them beat in illogic.
The tone of the film is comedy action horror film. There are endless jokes, the sheriff (and we) don't see the monsters for the better part of the first hour and it becomes a running joke. Also there is a running joke about everyone having all these high end weapons. Everything has a humorous edge-even the violence that makes you wince. I smiled at all the attempts at humor.
I never felt suspense. Blame the fact that the pacing is terrible. As I said, we don't see the monsters for almost an hour....and then a great deal of it early on is in the clips and trailers (the film promised in the trailer is not really here- and someone please explain why they are showing so much in the clips). Yes there is more, but I kept waiting for stuff that we hadn't seen before and by the time we got it I was not connected to the film. I simply didn't care because on top of everything there really aren't characters just cut outs that are moved around.
This feels like it was put together in a series of conversations where everyone threw out these great idea for pieces but never came up with a way to connect them up logically. For me it is Na Hong-jin's least film because everything feels completely random and not fully thought out. (This is supposed to be the first of a trilogy so I hope the next films are better plotted)
Yea, I know its a giant monster film, there is no need for complete logic, but all films must work on their own logic and HOPE doesn't. Things just happen, people just show up and then disappear. There is no real sense of the characters moving through the story, just people being dropped into places so they can be at the next set piece, despite there being no clue how they (say the monster) got there.
To be fair this might have worked, and I might have bought this more if the CGI was better, but they and a lot of the effects are not that good. I heard they supposedly tweaked them, but if they did, I don't want to know what they loked like before. What we see are great pieces of action committed by poorly animated computer creations.
To be fair I love some of the batshit crazy stuff that happens, but at the same time I was bored by everything that happens around them. My question is what is this almost three hours? I wanted to get out clippers and cut this down by 45 minutes to an hour.
Maybe it was the fact that I had a bad day up until I got to the theater, or maybe it's the huge push social media mavens and Neon are giving it, but HOPE disappointed me. While I know I will revisit, as I said I love moments, over all I'm left scratching my head as to what people see in it.
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