HOPE Explained: Why Korea Is Divided Over Na Hong-jin's New Film

[00:00:00]Hi islanders, this is Hana and welcome back to my island.

[00:00:05]This video contains spoilers for the film Hope.

[00:00:09]Hope played in the competition again back in May, so a small circle of international film fans already cut an early cut there, but Nahung Jin kept working on the film after that. The version that opened in Korea on July 15th isn't quite the same cut done. So, and overseas theaters won't get this version until September. So, think of this video as a conversation about Korea using this film as the doorway in made before most of you get the chance to see it for yourselves. Here's what I would suggest. Watch this video now. Go see Hope when it opens near you on September 9th and then come back and watch this again. I think it will land differently the second time. Nangin's new film arrived 10 years after the whailing.

[00:01:03]Hang and Chong Yan lead the cast with Michael Bestpender, Alicia Bakender and Taylor Russell play the aliens. Hope got a standing ovation at gun and broke Korea's record for advanced ticket sales on opening day. And the ratings are strange. On Korean review sites, a normal film score distribution looks like a gentle hill. This one looks like a camel with the two humps.

[00:01:35]53% of viewers rated it 9 or 10 out of 10. 22% rated it one or two. Almost nobody landed in the middle. One more thing worth knowing going in. Hope's budget is estimated as somewhere between 35 and $50 million, a record for a Korean film. That's still a fraction of what a typical Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster spends, often $150 million or more. Korea makes films for a domestic market of about 50 million people. that's always kept budget smaller here and it's part of why Korean Jung cinema leans so hard on story and character instead of scale. Japan and France run into something similar.

[00:02:31]Big budget sci-fi at Hollywood's level is hard to justify almost anywhere outside the US. So keep that gap in mind. What Hope manages to pull off on this budget is part of why it's such a big deal here. Let me work you through what I took from this film twice. Once at a press screening and once on opening day. Shall we begin?

[00:02:57]In a small fishing village called Hopo, pressed against the DMG, a bull is found dead, covered in a cloud marks, nothing eaten. Hopo, by the way, is a quite pun on the film's own title, Hope. Not a hungry animal. Then a young man recalls hearing that tigers sometimes come down from North Korea. Must be a tiger. That single line sets the whole village in motion. Patrols, hunting parties, an entire town on alert. But no one has actually seen this tiger. It exists only as a chain of secondhand claims almost like unicorn. Nobody has witnessed it.

[00:03:41]Yet everyone firmly believes it's out there. The tiger isn't really an animal here. It's a shared belief and belief doesn't need evidence to spread.

[00:03:54]The question running through the whole film is simple. What do we do when we meet something we can't understand?

[00:04:02]The tiger is the first answer. By the end, the film itself becomes the second.

[00:04:10]Partway through the old man who supposedly started the rumor describes exactly what he saw in the ouds. He never once say tiger. He says monster, alien. So this wasn't a baseless rumor.

[00:04:26]There was an accurate sighting and an accurate account of it. somewhere between his mouth and the rest of the village. It turned into a tiger because alien wasn't a word the village could actually use. Leaving something unexplainable as it is means you can't act on it. A tiger is different. It's a threat the village already had a drawer for and the moment the accident gets filed there, the whole town suddenly has a shared language for its fear.

[00:05:00]Nobody does this out of malice. It's a reflex. And the film never corrects it.

[00:05:08]Nobody comes back and admits the tiger was wrong. It just get dropped once a bigger disaster arrives. Forgotten or rather than disproven because it never needed proof to begin with.

[00:05:23]This village set in the 1980s is strong with anti-communist banners.

[00:05:29]Watching them, I thought of rhetoric we keep hearing again today all over the world. Since Korea's liberation, anti-communism has always been a language designed from the top down to unite people around one designated enemy, regardless of the actual threat.

[00:05:47]The town official mobilizing his patrol felt like watching the same old tool run at village scale. In late June, Donald Trump compared communism to a disease that needs cutting out. Even though the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago, and per an AP analysis, the American Communist Party has almost no influence left. Korea has its own version, language branding progressive as secretly pro- North Korean. The tiger and the kind of labeling share the same grammar. Neither is fact. Both are belief and belief repeated enough starts standing in for reality.

[00:06:32]A real disaster starts small. A reclusive woodworker shoots a baby alien in the mountains and hides the body.

[00:06:41]Humans struck first. While the village fears a tiger, nobody looks at the actual cause among them. That doesn't make humans purely victims either. The town officer accidentally shoots the village butcher while defending against the aliens, then shrugs it off as an avoidable sacrificing one person for the greater cause. The kind of loic you would expect from an authoritarian system, not a democracy.

[00:07:11]Yet, it happens anyway. The woodworker shows no remorse either, only anger at losing his trophy. Both men cause a man's home. Neither pays for it. One had a cause to hide behind. The other didn't even need one. This film is weighing justified violence against injustified violence. There's no scale here at all.

[00:07:37]Victims and perpetrators aren't clearly separated, and justice doesn't necessarily arrive. I think this merciless randomness is exactly what Naong Jin keeps circling back to. Life is not something you control. So let go of the need to control it.

[00:07:57]For more than 50 years, Korea's foreign residence card carried the word alien printed right on the front. from the first premise in 1966 until it was finally renamed residence card in 2021.

[00:08:14]54 years to remove one word that this whole time described a foreign resident and a creature from outer space identically. That's not an accident of vocabulary.

[00:08:27]An alien is an outsider, a foreigner, and a being from outer space all at once. someone who isn't one of us, an invader.

[00:08:38]And the moment you attach that label, you automatically become the victim.

[00:08:44]That's the emotional logic of this village. When people miss something unfamiliar, the first move usually isn't trying to understand it. It's writing yourself into the victim's role. So, you never have to ask what you did first or what you got wrong. Some of that instinct likely traces back to Korea's own division. Decades of trading whatever lies beyond the DMZ as a permanent threat, hardening into raress toward anything unfamiliar from outside.

[00:09:18]Every alien role in this film went to a western actor and the director says the reason was purely practical. a long friendship with Alicia Vikender whose husband Fesbender then joined too. No symbolic intent by his own account, but it's worth noticing anyway. The aliens are built almost entirely through CGI, so the actor's actual race barely appears on screen. Nationality wasn't visually necessary for these roles, and yet every one of them went to a Western actor. This is a Korean film made by a Korean crew and the role of the intruder when two western faces. Jor is essentially an empress mio or her warrior.

[00:10:08]Wherever the film reaches for cosmic scale and myth western faces. Meanwhile, the Korean lead stay specific individuals throughout with names, accents, job titles. The universal gets a western face. The locer gets ours. A pattern repeating even inside a Korean made story.

[00:10:33]The plot logic here, one shooting leading to a mother ship crash is loose.

[00:10:40]But in this film, airtight causality is just a one ingredient, not the whole dish.

[00:10:47]This is quite interesting. Korean audiences tend to treat story as a film's most important skeleton, holding on to narrative continuity and plausibility, even in high adrenaline jungles. Unlike Holl's recent drift toward prioritizing spectacle over a smooth story, judged by this standard, hope looks like a failure, especially next to the meticulous plotting of Hong Junho or Pakano.

[00:11:19]For a lot of Korean viewers, this isn't just a taste. Korean society leans toward wanting one correct answer and is less practiced as simply sitting with something unresolved.

[00:11:33]Just like the villagers wanted a name for their threat, audiences here want a name for their ending. Domestic reviews repeated the same complaints. Lose story, unexplained cause, unsettling ending.

[00:11:51]Overseas, the same complaint landed completely differently. Hollywood reporter critic David Rooney called it an instant cult classic. Foreign critics placed it beside Michael Bay Spielberg no MadMax Fury Road and treated the thin story as part of the fun rather than a flaw. One viewer simply said they would apply the rule of cool. The action looks so good. The rough CGI didn't matter.

[00:12:24]Audiences generally want to feel taken care of by a film and a tight story gives that confidence. Now Jin doesn't hand you that confidence. He leaves gaps and hands you the work of filling them.

[00:12:39]Western audiences tend to surrender first to a film sensory pleasure. Korean audiences tend to demand persuation before they will surrender at all. Maybe we could all get more comfortable simply enjoying the space a director leaves empty.

[00:12:59]Most of the humor here shows up exactly where control breaks down. The official bumbling, the old man's rambling, every laugh reconfirms that nobody actually has this under control. The line that stuck with me longest, a hunter who normally just drives a truck suddenly rides a horse remarkably well, and another character in the car just asked out loud why he can ride so well. I burst out laughing.

[00:13:34]That's the director's whole attitude toward his own plot holes in one line.

[00:13:40]Handing the audience is exactly question to a character first. Basically saying, "Yeah, I know. Let's just go with it."

[00:13:51]So, what's actually at the center of this film?

[00:13:56]Running.

[00:13:58]Just running right now. wherever that leads toward hope or ruin.

[00:14:04]NAS characters have always thrown their bodies forward before thinking. The chase in the chaser, the flight in the yellow sea, the sprinting in the whailing.

[00:14:17]This time the destination stops mirroring. So running stops being a means and becomes something complete in itself. The dialogue is packed with a profanity functioning almost like a punctuation and apostrophe and question mark. I'm genuinely curious how the English subtitles are going to handle all of it. This isn't a film delivering ideas through polished language. It bodies and reflexes replacing language.

[00:14:49]This film mixes horror, mystery, black comedy, action, sci-fi, and comic horror all at once. It feels like a roller coaster you keep wanting one more ride on even after it ends.

[00:15:06]Hang's movement and the camera track each other almost like a tango. The alien point of view shots stood out, especially flipping the film's whole theme. In Nongjin's early work, the unknown always stayed outside human sight. Here, the camera becomes the alien's own eyes looking back at us.

[00:15:29]Cinematographer Hongyong Pure brings his familiar fog and low saturation into the closed space of the DMG.

[00:15:38]Well, the film loses ground is sound.

[00:15:41]When the score swells, the dialogue underneath, which isn't carrying much weight to begin with, gets hard to hear.

[00:15:50]Chonguan's delivery stands out oddly against this, almost shouting through the whole runtime.

[00:15:58]It turns out that was intentional. Naong Jin asked her from the early tables to pinch her voice higher. That way she could cut through the music. He locked in the result with extra post production work. One actor needed a separate vocal strategy just to survive the mix. That says something about the sound design.

[00:16:22]It's a real shortcoming in a film built as carefully everywhere else.

[00:16:28]The aliens speak a language nobody can understand for nearly the whole film.

[00:16:35]Only near the very end do subtitles finally arrive. A deliberate choice.

[00:16:41]Nahung Jin decides exactly when we are allowed to understand them. And for two and a half hours, we only see them through human eyes.

[00:16:52]So here's my question. Does reading a subtitle mean we've actually understand these beings? I don't think so.

[00:17:02]Translating language and understanding of being are different things. The moment Jor's grief over her lost child reaches us as text, we gain information, but it arrives too late to undo two and a half hours of treating her as other.

[00:17:19]What the film hands us at the end is an understanding. It's the belated realization that we already missed our chance. In this film, understanding always shows up after the damage is already permanent. Write down the aliens dialogue offers a definition. Hope isn't proof of what you can see is believing in something even without seeing it.

[00:17:47]There's also a line telling them to change their fate. The villagers believed in something unseen too. But what they believed in was a threat. And that belief leads to violence. Both the official and the woodworker hid behind the great cause trading everything is already decided for them. Change of fate is a direct rejection of exactly that kind of excuse. Then the final image, everyone abandons their car and runs down an empty highway. Everything collapsing around them. And yet it feels like they are running toward hope instead.

[00:18:31]Maybe hope and ruin were never really different directions. Maybe the only truth this film wanted to hold on to is that single moment of running before either outcome is decided.

[00:18:46]Running without proof.

[00:18:49]Maybe that's this film's entire definition of hope.

[00:18:55]People walked into this theater carrying a pile of secondhand opinions already floating around. The story is thin. The ending is strange. Is a failure or someone said so exactly the way the tiger got built inside the film itself.

[00:19:14]But in front of the screen, that rumor quietly falls apart. One face of this film is the one I've tried through this whole video. Anti-communist language.

[00:19:27]Double standards hiding behind a greater cause. The outer branded an alien understanding that always arrives too late. Read at the weight. It genuinely holds up. The other face laughs all of that off completely. The plot hole joked about out loud. the viewers who just applies a rule of coal. This film never forces you to pick one. It lays a heavy allegory and a light joke side by side and welcomes you in through either door.

[00:20:00]10 years ago, walking out of the whailing, I felt a quiet unease that stuck with me for days, like I'd just gone around with the director. Walking out of hope, I felt something closer to relief, like I'd finally been let go after being dragged along. What this film seemed to be telling me was to let go of my own need to control everything.

[00:20:28]And the person delivering the message is Nahungin itself, known on set as a relentless perfectionist who argued over a tan over bell of sound violence right up until release. There is something genuinely ironic about a message to let go of control delivered through 156 minutes of that much precision.

[00:20:53]Has the director changed with age? Have I changed as a viewer? Maybe both. So just let go, hand it over, and enjoy the ride. I genuinely love this film. It's been a while since the Korean film gave me that strange electric thrill.

[00:21:14]Hope is a film built entirely around one question. What do people do when they miss something they can't understand? I didn't expect to watch that exact question walk straight off the screen and into real life the moment the film opened. Korean reviews repeat the same lines. Great action, but the story doesn't back it up. nothing but question marks.

[00:21:39]Underneath is the reaction. Something unfamiliar showed up, refused to fit the expected shape and people needed a way to explain that discomfort to themselves. In Korea specifically, that discomfort went somewhere darker fast.

[00:21:57]Online forums are full of mocking the director followed by streams of abuse.

[00:22:04]Some viewers said all they heard working out of the theater was inserts and have stopped to bring the film up since.

[00:22:13]Attacking people in comment sections purely for disagreeing has become routine. At that point, this stops being a reaction to one film. The movie becomes an excuse. Anger that had already been building elsewhere finds a convenient target. It's exactly what the villagers do in this film. They reach for a weapon they would kept hidden.

[00:22:37]Then they fire at the unfamiliar thing without asking a single question first.

[00:22:43]I want to be direct about this because it's bigger than one film. This is the same closedness the film spends two and a half hours examining now playing out in real time in Korean review sections and comment threads. A society practiced and treating the unfamiliar as a threat to be named and neutralized rather than something to sit with. A society more comfortable with one correct answer than with ambiguity.

[00:23:16]Watching a film together used to be a space where people helped each other make sense of something new. Right now around this film that space is filling with hostility toward each other.

[00:23:31]Instead the philosopher Hamyong Chur has argued that society capable of tolerating only sameness ends up pushing away anything genuinely different.

[00:23:44]Complaining the film explains too little is the same reaction underneath.

[00:23:49]something unfamiliar that refuses to fit a familiar frame, a failure that can't be put into words. So, it turns into hostility instead. I also keep thinking about something the critic Shinyong Ch wrote a while back that real newness almost never arrives fully polished.

[00:24:12]That is messy and uncomfortable at first. And the honest move is to start from that awkward new thing rather than retreat to something familiar.

[00:24:24]Looking unfinished is no more a failing.

[00:24:26]It's just what new attempts look like to eyes trained on the existing order.

[00:24:32]Especially in a society that wants one correct answer above everything else.

[00:24:39]Whoever breaks new ground takes arrows on the way even toward a clan. Now Jin broke that ground for Korean cinema with hope. Setting an opening speed box office record and taking just as many errors in return. He clearly knew this path would look messy going in. He started from the uncomfortable new thing. Anyway, I want to root for this film in that spirit. I hope Korean cinema keeps producing stranger, rougher attempts like this one. And when we run into them, I hope we are not a society that reaches straight for the weapon in the closet.

[00:25:23]So, what do you think? I would genuinely love to know how you read this film.

[00:25:29]Leave your take in the comments. This has been Hana's Island. If this video resonate with you, hit like and subscribe. And if you'd like to support this channel, you can join as a member.

[00:25:41]I will see you next time. Until then, stay well on your own island at whatever latitude fits you best.

[00:25:50]Take care. Bye.