Quest-en-Scène: Hope Is Not What I Expected

I was very excited to see Hope. All of the trailers I saw were excellent, promising a tense monster movie with lots of cool action set pieces, the perfect thing to watch on a random evening as an escape from my already exhausting workload. What I did not realize was that the trailer only shows the first 30-ish minutes of the film, and I was in for a wild, nearly three-hour ride.

Hope follows the police chief of a small South Korean village in his attempts to hunt down and kill a mysterious monster that has been slaughtering the townsfolk and wreaking havoc. The first 30 minutes of the film are by far the best part. The film does an incredible job of building tension as the characters slowly realize the gravity of the threat they are about to face. What starts out as (assumedly) a wild animal killing livestock gets scarier and scarier until the viewer’s mind is racing trying to imagine what could possibly be causing this much carnage. The tension only grows once the action begins. The chief looks on in horror as the monster blazes a path through the village, with buildings collapsing from seemingly impossible amounts of force and countless bodies piling up. The filmmakers hold back from allowing the viewer to see the monster for as long as possible, artfully aiming the camera and arranging locations so it is always just out of reach. This is an incredible choice that makes the situation feel impossibly hopeless. This chaos is caused by an unknowable, almost divine force of destruction and there is nothing one man with a machine gun can possibly do to stop it. I was hoping the film would keep up this theme for as long as possible, hell, maybe even for the whole movie! 

In an almost-too-predictable turn of events, things began to fall apart the moment the monster was shown. This leads me to my main criticism of this film: the CGI looks goofy as hell. Up until this point, the atmosphere and mood felt dramatic and serious, befitting the extremely high stakes and unimaginable terror the protagonist was facing. I wish the filmmakers had let me continue to simply use my imagination, because when I finally saw the monster my jaw dropped, not in awe or fear, but confusion. This was what was blowing this entire town to smithereens? Something that looked like a rejected CGI abomination from Spy Kids? This movie is reportedly the most expensive South Korean film of all time and that’s the best they could come up with? 

This was only the beginning. As the film went on, more and more varieties of monster were revealed and each was more silly looking and nonthreatening than the last, making it extremely difficult to take the threat seriously to the extent the filmmakers wanted me to. I don’t know what they were thinking. Did they come up with an overly ambitious concept that they were unable to execute properly, or did they genuinely think the final product looked good? Only time will tell…

My other main criticism of the film is that it is way too long. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a long film when it’s executed well! However, to make a long film that engages the viewer throughout the entire runtime, one must take care to make every moment count and ultimately justify the film’s runtime. Hope does not do this. The middle section of the film is dull and extremely repetitive. The characters are trying to understand where the monsters are coming from and the true nature behind the film’s events, but these mystery elements feel long and overly drawn out. The characters ultimately reach conclusions that would have taken 20 minutes to figure out in a better movie instead of an hour. Additionally, while most of the action scenes in the film are artful and well-done, the main action set piece of this section is uninspired, which feels like watching paint dry in comparison to the bombastic insanity throughout the rest of the film. 

This brings me to my final point. While for the most part I have been critical of this film, it does unambiguously shine in one area: the action scenes. The best way to describe the action scenes is that the filmmakers clearly only have one question on their minds: what is the coolest possible thing that could happen right now? All regard for realism and physics is thrown completely out the window in favor of cool visuals, leaving scenes that in all honestly don’t really make that much sense but are incredible to watch. The way things play out is so ridiculous it is almost cartoonish, having more in common with a Looney Toons short than any action movie I’ve seen recently. I often struggle to enjoy action movies because many of them are too self-serious. In my opinion, an action movie is at its best when it remembers that it’s a movie and doesn’t have to abide by the rules of what would be strictly possible in reality. This idea is reflected by my favorite scene in Hope, which is one of the best car chase sequences I have ever seen in a film. At one point, a man jumps from the back of a horse onto the roof of a moving car and then starts shooting at a monster while balancing on the roof Teen Wolf style. It’s awesome. The best part about Hope is that it understands that the point of a good action movie is to make your characters do things that are sick as hell to watch.

Is Hope a good movie? Not really. It’s too long, a lot of it looks bad, and it has one of the most baffling endings I have ever seen. Would I recommend it? Absolutely! The action scenes are absolutely exhilarating and the movie doesn’t take itself seriously, which allows me to be fairly forgiving of its flaws. All in all, despite how flawed it is and how confusing many of the filmmaker’s choices were, I had a blast watching the film. I hope that action movies going forward will take the best parts of Hope to heart and make something even better. Let action movies be silly again!