Hope cracks off with a riveting and thrilling hour to hour and a half that shows everything great cinema can be - then completely shits the bed in the back half.
Local cop Beom Seok (Hwang Jung-min) is called to a dead cow on the road by some locals. What starts as a thought of a wild tiger turns into something much more otherworldly as a terrifying monster attacks the harbour town of Hope. But it’s what happens after Beom Seok battles one monster that is truly terrifying; he and his team discover there are more in the forest.
The first half of Hope is incredible.
Taut, fast, well-acted and impossibly thrilling, while also building in moments of humour and levity. The action is remarkably tense, and the film has a real sense of place; as our hero charges around the city as it is being steadily destroyed, we get a real vibe of the whole layout. It feels real and lived in. And more than that, it makes incredible use of a smaller budget; delivering a grip the edge of your seat non-stop thrill ride that sucks you straight in.
Even when the first cracks start to appear, Hope holds its ground. Some terrible CGI work can’t defuse the crackling energy of the first half, even though that CGI looks like a PS2 cut scene.
It’s once that initial monster battle is over that the film completely goes off the rails. Extra terrestrials played by, inexplicably, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, start duking it out in the forest with a cohort of locals, and while the initial battle in the streets of a local town feels electric, this feels muted. The wild freneticism of the first half gives way to slow, nonsense battles, an expanded lore and a bunch of garbled alien stuff. It’s a slog, and sets up an unlikely sequel.
In the end though, Hope gives just that. It’s a film that shows how grit and ingenuity in filmmaking still has a place in our world. How big budgets aren’t always the thing needed to tell a great story. And at the same time, it’s a cautionary tale about how too much ambition can scupper a blindingly good run. Icarus indeed.
