Space Monster Wangmagwi (1967)

directed by Kwon Hyeok-Jin

South Korea

82 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I started working a night-shift job for the first time in my life recently and to be frank I did not have my shit together enough last month to do Kaijune like I usually do. Fortunately, however, there are two months with "-ju" in the name.

Welcome to Kaijuly.

Space Monster Wangmagwi is a South Korean monster movie. You will often hear that it was supposedly lost, but it was just lacking a home media release; the Korean Film Archive held copies and would screen it on occasion. SRS Cinema's recent restoration and subtitling of the film has exposed it to a wider audience, but it should really be noted that this film was not, as the story goes, fully lost. 

This film is historically important, as it's the first all-Korean science fiction film and the oldest Korean monster movie, but it's also just really fun: it's interesting to watch a film industry do this stuff for the first time ever. 1967 was the year that all of Japan's major film studios produced a kaiju movie (Toho with Son of Godzilla, Nikkatsu with Gappa, and Daiei with Gamera vs. Gyaos), so this movie came at a time when monster movies were very popular. I am a stickler for only applying the term "kaiju" to specifically Japanese giant monsters - I don't think it makes sense otherwise - but I can justify including this film in Kaijuly because most people who are into kaiju stuff would probably also be into this. 

The plot is bare-bones: aliens, having scouted Earth as the perfect planet for their invasion, release a monster upon their targeted landing site (the southern part of the Korean peninsula) to weaken the populace and make it easier for them to take over. Wangmagwi was not originally huge, but the aliens figured things so that it would expand upon contact with Earth's atmosphere until it became a city-destroying giant. Wangmagwi itself is innocent in all this - even when the aliens are wrangling it out of its cage and shoving it out of their spaceship, it's resisting like a trapped animal. It doesn't destroy out of malevolence; it's just a scared, confused creature, out of its element and under attack for reasons it cannot fathom.

What's interesting here is the way the human characters are handled. I assumed that the two we started the film with would be the protagonists: a young woman and her soon-to-be husband, who is an air force pilot. He gets called away when Wangmagwi lands on the night before their wedding, and she eventually is abducted by Wangmagwi, being carried around in its hand for most of the film. But these people are not the main characters. In fact, I don't believe this is a film that has main characters. We follow several disparate people throughout the course of the film, and none of them feels any more important than another. The random street urchin who we're first introduced to after he's broken into some rich guy's house and eaten all his food does far more to wound Wangmagwi than the literal actual military.

I did not expect Space Monster Wangmagwi to be this funny, either. Mentioning this almost constitutes a spoiler because it's better to go into it believing everything will be played straight. It is at first, but then you've got two chuckleheads betting each other's houses and wives on which of them will survive the monster attack, a guy who really, really needs to go to the bathroom in the middle of the evacuation, and the aforementioned street urchin getting stuck in Wangmagwi's sinuses and peeing in there. This is a more accurate picture of how utterly chaotic and disorganized humans would be in the case of a monster attack than most monster movies will provide. Everybody is running around willy-nilly and just generally acting like dumbasses.

So, what about Wangmagwi itself? As I said, it doesn't have a lot of personality other than just being confused and upset. The way it tramples on Seoul is quite cautious, actually; at times it almost seems to be deliberately going around large structures. It takes a long time to even decide that it wants to smash a building. Its design is... well, it's a design, certainly. Kind of an apeish, toothy, weirdly gangly humanoid thing with big ears that looks like it's coated in rubber cement. But I'll tell you one thing that this movie does surprisingly well: scale. It really nails the miniatures, and accents them with shots of people looking up at the monster in horror, so the overall effect of Wangmagwi's size is very convincing.

This movie surprised me in a lot of ways. The SRS Cinema restoration is stunningly crisp and clear, and it's a testament to the craft of the filmmakers that the effects still look good with the patina of time wiped away. The storyline isn't going to win any awards but the human characters do manage to be sympathetic. The cinematography is genuinely good. I'm really, really fond of Space Monster Wangmagwi, and I'm glad it's getting the recognition it deserves.

Colossal (2016)

directed by Nacho Vigalondo

Canada, South Korea, Spain, USA

109 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I was recommended this by somebody who knows I'm really into kaiju, and it made me realize that I had no excuse for not having already seen it. It's been out for seven years, I'm a fan of Nacho Vigalondo, and it does have a giant monster in it (a giant robot too!), despite not being what I would really call a "kaiju film", strictly speaking. This is a movie that uses monsters to represent many different concepts, most of them relating to the manifestation of the unconscious and our responsibility as individuals, and at best, it's a really interesting, original film with ideas that I truly haven't seen before, while at worst, some of it just... doesn't work. This review will contain major spoilers.

Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, an alcoholic rapidly losing control of her life, although the people around her also really suck and I'd argue they're responsible for half of her problems. After getting kicked out of her boyfriend's apartment, she returns to her dismal hometown, setting up in a ramshackle house that belonged or belongs to some little-elaborated-upon relative. While she's there, she meets Oscar, a "friend" from when she was a kid, who seemingly wants to lend her a hand, giving her a part-time job at his bar and occasionally dropping off random furniture. At the same time, news breaks of a giant monster attacking Seoul, South Korea. We should basically all know this by now, but the monster is connected to and controlled by Gloria, appearing in a specific district of Seoul at 8:05 in the morning when Gloria also happens to be in a specific spot (a park outside a school) at that same time. Although she doesn't realize it at first, she can control the monster's movements, and is absolutely horrified to find out that her actions have physical, material results, leading to the deaths of an unspecified number of people and immeasurable property damage.

Usually I don't put too much stock into names in fiction unless it seems really obvious the author is trying to tell us something, because personally, I know that when I write, I just name my characters whatever comes to mind first. But for some reason I think it's interesting that the lead is named "Gloria". Maybe it stuck out to me because it's a name that I think of as an "old person name", at least in the English-speaking world; Vigalondo is Spanish, and it may have different connotations elsewhere. It was only introduced to English audiences in the 1890s, as the name of a character in a novel who was herself Portuguese. So having a young, English-speaking woman with that name felt unusual to me. The name literally means "glory", obviously, and it is part of the Spanish and Portuguese titles of the Virgin Mary. One could argue that the Gloria in this film does give birth to the monster through a kind of immaculate conception, but I think naming her something that means "glory" is also relevant to her status as a hero, a rescuer, someone who evolved from believing she was the center of the world for selfish reasons to realizing that, in this context, she kind of is the center of the world, and she needs to use that power responsibly. There are problems with this, of course, and I'll talk about those towards the end of this review.

The monster is not just a monster. It's never just a monster. In this case it is a physical manifestation of the protagonist's inner feelings, which mostly constitute self-hatred. I think part of the metaphor here may have been the idea that if you're unkind to yourself, the world as a whole suffers, and that by improving yourself, you improve the world. That certainly does happen in Colossal, literally: When Gloria stops acting like a drunk idiot and realizes that her actions are having real-world consequences that are harming and even killing people, the monster also stops being a force of destruction, and the world suffers a little less. This is also emphasized by the fact that her old buddy Oscar turns out to be a cad and a scoundrel, and unfortunately he also happens to have a giant external id running around in Seoul, in the form of a robot. Whereas Gloria is devastated when she learns the results of what just felt like harmless drunk fun and immediately curtails her behavior, Oscar figures since he wasn't technically, physically there, who cares? Those people are far away, I didn't hurt them with my own two hands, so whatever. I can stomp on anything I want because it's not really me doing the harm. And one of the results of this is that the film shifts from being about Gloria trying to get her life together to being about Gloria getting into this really quite terrifying abusive relationship with Oscar - not a relationship in the romantic sense, but in the sense that he's forcing her to remain in physical proximity to him and do what he wants because he knows how to manipulate her. He knows that as long as he's there threatening to wipe out Seoul, she'll stay to try and stop him.

Now... I'm making a good-faith assumption on Vigalondo's part and assuming he realizes that he's using an entire country as helpless bystanders for his metaphor, and realizes that that is kiiiind of not a great look. That two white Westerners' actions can be so influential as to have an entire non-Western country under their thrall is self-congratulatory at best. I have to say I almost got to really disliking this movie at the end, when the day is saved because a white woman Knows What To Do. The Korean military is useless, the citizens are at the mercy of these two people an ocean away, until Gloria steps in. I know that pretty much everything in this movie is meant to be taken as a metaphor, but when the metaphor involves actual, real-life people, you have to be a lot more delicate. Also, Toho sued the production company (this is what happens when you say the G-word in public as a filmmaker), which is rumored to have been why the location was changed to Seoul instead of somewhere in Japan, which would fit more with the popular conception of kaiju movies. So it doesn't really matter where Gloria's monster is materializing - it just had to be somewhere far off that isn't Us™.

I also forgot most of the time that this is apparently supposed to be somewhat of a comedy. I don't think there was anything in this film I found funny. There were moments where I could recognize that things could be taken as funny, like Oscar stomping around on the playground while people scream in the background, but I had a reaction much more like Gloria when she realizes what she's done. It's all just kind of too harrowing to be funny.

This is a really inventive movie that does what everybody should do with monsters, which is use them to explore human psychology (because it's us that creates the monsters, which means that in some way, the monsters are us, right?). It delivers an interesting message about growing out of self-hate and being dragged down by jealous people, and also about selfishness. When everybody starts getting tired of Oscar watching the viral "thug life" slap gif over and over, he says "I'm not the one watching it a thousand times, everyone else has". This is a perfect example of how nobody ever thinks anything is their fault - Oscar's never the bad guy, the bad things are being done by other people. He's not contributing to the problem, how can he? He's just his little old self, just one person. But the whole end message of this is that one person can make a massive difference. I just wish it hadn't fallen into the gravity well of the White Savior narrative to achieve that message.

The Tower (2012)

directed by Kim Ji-hoon

South Korea

121 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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It's debatable whether or not this is technically a Christmas movie, even though it takes place on Christmas Day. The holiday is essentially just a backdrop, which is actually something I'll touch upon later because I felt that it could have been used much more effectively. This is mainly a disaster movie, something South Korea's film industry seems to do pretty well, and even though it doesn't diverge too far from the standard model of a disaster film, it's still good for casual viewing, if not an in-depth, critical watch.

There's a whole lot of characters in this bad boy and the first half-hour is dedicated to making sure you know who all of them are. The set-up is fairly typical for disaster movies in that a lot, if not all, of the characters are established as having something (usually someone) left hanging; a promise that they must go back and fulfill. They make a vow to someone they love, whether literal or unspoken, and that hangs over them for the entirety of the film, so that whenever they're in mortal peril we think of who or whatever they would be leaving behind. It's a pretty standard grab for our heartstrings, but nearly every film with high stakes does it at some point, so it's just a spectrum with one end being bland and emotionless and the other end being the handful of movies in which the trope is pulled off well (Train to Busan, for one other South Korean example). It does feel obvious that the romantic connections and family obligations here are being set up from the start, but in this instance I think it's done pretty well and manages to hit the emotional beats without feeling too forced.

The film takes place in a massive apartment complex consisting of two glass towers connected by a sky bridge, housing something like 5700 people as well as fine dining and everything else that typically comes with a luxury apartment. Most of the people who live and work there are extremely rich, but there are some less wealthy who can get in by winning a lottery, as well as many underpaid and overworked cleaning and kitchen staff. To create the most dazzling experience possible for the residents, who by now expect a high standard of living, a squadron of helicopters is called in to drop synthetic snow over the area of the towers so that everyone can have a white Christmas. This hubris is what leads to the literal downfall of the towers when a helicopter crashes in the high winds and sets one of the towers on fire, trapping and killing many of the residents, who must now fight their way to the bottom and try to survive.

I guess there's supposed to be a point being made about inequality here, but to me the movie didn't push it strongly enough. The mayor of Seoul is as out-of-touch as the rich residents of the towers and is behind the decisions that repeatedly ignore the people still trapped and struggling in the building and categorize them as beyond rescue without even trying. He's presented with a list of people inside the building ordered according to "priority" and asked for his word on who to save and who to leave behind like some of them don't matter. The people inside the building must continually fight against measures taken to save the few in favor of the many, such as firewalls that isolate them from any hope of exit and eventually the full demolition of the building.

But there's just no real emphasis behind it. Yes, a lot of the rich people are shown as annoying and bullying anyone they view as weaker than them. But for the most part, no fault is established. In my opinion the most horrible part of this movie was the reason behind the fire, not because the elites who ordered a fancy fake snow display were innocent, but because they wrapped people who were innocent up into their egotism. This parallels real life, somewhat, in that the super-wealthy will continue to do things for their own enjoyment or because it's more convenient to keep doing them even though they're actively dangerous and destroying the environment, and it's not them who suffer, it's all of us who they drag along for the ride. The movie doesn't really acknowledge this, though, and we never see anybody get held accountable or anything like that.

The reason why I felt like the Christmas motif was underused is because a lot of the time Christmas movies are used to highlight inequality: the end message of A Christmas Carol might be basically to not be a dick, but it also explicitly involves treating everyone right and not hoarding wealth for yourself. The Tower just kind of happens to be set on Christmas for no particular reason other than aesthetics. To be fair, Christmas is not, at least originally, a Korean holiday, so the use of it as a soapbox to talk about inequality doesn't have as much (or any) history there as it might in the West. But I'm certain that by now most people are familiar with A Christmas Carol as well as other similar media, and maybe this is too optimistic of me, but even if they weren't, I would hope that any holiday centered around giving and togetherness would inspire feelings of empathy for all humans.

In the end this movie probably isn't worth how much I'm talking about it. It is just fine as an action/disaster movie, and some parts do get a little emotional, particularly the end. The CGI seemed pretty solid but the file I was watching was in such poor quality that those flames could have been orange tissue paper and they still would have looked real to me. I am surprised that this isn't more popular, but I guess it just feels a little too generic next to the other, better Korean disaster films out there. You could do much worse, though, and I definitely got involved in the characters and the lengths they had to go to keep themselves alive. Good one for if you, like me, live in a place where it snows on Christmas maybe one year out of every ten.