There is a moment in one of the four hells of director Yong-hwa Kim’s South Korean fantasy epic Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days where Dante meets Jurassic Park. Gang-lim (Jung-woo Ha), one of the guardians of the afterlife, is escorting Soo-hong (Dong-wook Kim), a recently deceased soldier, through a series of trials to prove that he had been murdered. Their path takes them through a hell that manifests that which Soo-hong fears most and suddenly the guardian and his charge are being chased by velociraptors. A T-Rex shows up to save them from the raptors and then a mosasaurus, the gigantic swimming dinosaur from Jurassic World, breaks through the ground and swallows them. The T-Rex watches dumbfounded while the mosasaurus swims off with the two men in its belly in a nod to Pinocchio.
The scene optimizes the bloviated, mashup nature of the film, which is not as harsh a criticism as it sounds. Kim wears his influences openly and without any self-conscience urge to mask his procurements. There is a hint of Peter Jackson here and the Wachowskis there with Spielberg binding it all together like flour. This is world cinema as Hollywood cinema, a special effects-laden fantasy that spans time and realities. It is also a sequel, but you lose nothing if you failed to see Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds. No matter the culture or point of origin, each segment in franchise filmmaking is meant to stand alone.
The film begins with a battle. Gang-lim and the two guardians he leads, Hae Won-maek (Ji-Hoon Ju) and Deok-choon (Hyang-gi Kim), are battling demons in the afterlife while they begin the trial for Soo-hong’s resurrection. If the trio is successful it will be the forty-ninth resurrection they will have achieved in their thousand years together, completing the pact they made with King Yeomra (Jung-jae Lee), the lord of the afterlife. Soo-hong’s resurrection will entitle each of the guardian’s their own resurrection, but there’s a catch. In the earlier film Soo-hong wreaked havoc as a vengeful spirit and the king is uncertain he deserves a fair trial. Gang-lim entreats his lord to allow the trial and King Yeomra agrees with a condition. Gang-lim can defend Soo-hong during his trial while Hae Won-maek and Deok-choon dispatch with a house god called Sung-joo (Dong-seok Ma). Guardians are basically grim reapers in Prada, but the house god will not allow any of them to ascend the old man he lives with.
With the plot set, the movie branches off in three directions. Gang-lim and Soo-hong make their way through the four hells as Gang-lim defends the man’s brief time as a vengeful spirit, proving his worthiness for resurrection. To pass the time during their wandering, Soo-hong gets Gang-lim to tell him the story of his life in the millennia before he became a guardian. The movie shifts to flashback sequences of Korea’s ancient Goryeo Dynasty where Gang-lim was the son of a great general. His tale becomes one of jealousy and murder as he falls out of favor with his father for an adopted brother. The story of Gang-lim’s fall soon becomes the origin story of the trio of guardians, but Hae Won-maek and Deok-choon will learn of their history through the house god Sung-joo.
Sung-joo is looking over an old man and his grandson in an impoverished neighborhood in contemporary Korea. He refuses to let the old man die until the grandson is set on a path to a better life. To that end, the house god has gotten into some trouble with loan sharks having borrowed some money to invest in mutual funds and cryptocurrency. House gods cannot hurt humans, but guardians can, so Hae Won-maek rebukes the loan sharks and a friendship forms between the three supernatural beings. The adventures of the two guardians and the god while they navigate the Korean social service system is the real pleasure of the film with Dong-seok Ma carrying every scene as the loving house god. Sung-joo is no fan of King Yeomra and tells the guardians about their lives when they were humans in the Goryeo Dynasty before the lord of the afterlife wiped away their memories.
It all sounds convoluted, but the film is a pleasure. Kim paints on a CGI canvas in the afterlife, but the individual hells are made distinct by practical effects that would make Guillermo del Toro rise and applaud. The Goryeo Dynasty sequences are as sumptuous and detailed as any historical epic while Sung-joo’s tiny apartment is brightly lit and full of joy. The inspirations may be apparent, but so is the talent that allows a filmmaker to play with multiple genres in the same film. The three guardians all have dual roles with their human characters in the historical epic and all prove up to the task. The only complaint to be lobbed at Kim and his screenwriters is the thinness of Hyang-gi Kim’s role. She is given little more to do as both guardian and mortal than to whimper and be saved, which is a pity given the robustness of the parts of her male counterparts.
But underdeveloped female roles are not the only crimes that Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days shares with a Hollywood blockbuster. It is derivative, bloated and longer than it should be, but has enough movie magic to stick with you hours after viewing. It even created the desire to hunt up its predecessor to see where it all began. And while we’re on the subject of movie sins – at least those defined by Christopher Nolan – there is a mid-credit sequence that sets up the next film. While it’s easy to accept this inclusion passively as part of the evolution of the blockbuster form, the homogeneity of this insertion felt less than marvelous. Blockbusters may be the formula that’s keeping the movie industry alive throughout the world, but that doesn’t mean they all have to look the same.
The post Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days appeared first on Spectrum Culture.