Lest one believe that only Hollywood can churn out a respectably mediocre piece of blockbuster entertainment, here is The Moon, a Korean import set in space and following an attempt to rescue a stranded astronaut, which plays out almost exactly as it might have under the direction of a filmmaker like Roland Emmerich. In what seems to be the biggest scope and budget of his career (which has until now been primarily focused on the installments of an ongoing franchise of the supernatural variety), the director here is Kim Yong-hwa, whose handling of the film’s various set pieces is so assured that one wishes he didn’t care so much about the thin human story that pads the film’s running time to well beyond two hours. The film never goes deep enough with these characters for us to care nearly as much.
At a brisk 100 minutes, the film could have tightened that surrounding story, which attempts to trace the past shared by Hwang Sun-woo (Doh Kyung-soo), an astronaut working with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) on a renewed mission to visit the lunar surface, and Kim Jae-guk (Sol Kyung-gu), a scientist who was involved with the first mission and is now dealing heavily with the tragedy that ensued. Three men were killed in a rocket booster explosion the first time, and it drove the primary research scientist in charge of the development of the rocket to suicide. Hwang is that man’s son and obviously harbors resentment toward Kim for the outcome. One gets a single guess as to whether there is a tearful confessional on the part of the latter during a particularly dramatic part of the climax.
The problem is that neither Hwang nor Kim is particularly developed with any complexity in the screenplay (written by the director) beyond this touchy and sensitive dynamic. The story attempts to give other, far less important characters something to do, but it just ends up being a two-pronged rescue mission, with Kim rallying the scientists and analysts on the ground and Hwang rallying his own intuitive skills in the craft, following a disastrous solar flare that kills the other two astronauts who begin the journey with him. Things need not be any deeper than that, and the momentum of the main story is interrupted by dumping expository dialogue onto the audience and by flashbacks that simply reiterate what’s in the dialogue.
Mostly, of course, it’s an excuse for those action set pieces. The visual effects are fairly impressive – including one truly dizzying shot that starts seemingly from the perspective of the end of a solar panel and circles around the spacecraft, ending on a close-up of Hwang’s face – and the tension is deeply felt, given the intestinal fortitude it must take to survive in space with rapidly depleting resources and no way of getting back on solid ground. The performances are solid enough when things are most desperate, although both actors here are less comfortable with the interpersonal stuff – perhaps because it’s so thin.
The final act of The Moon is genuinely rousing and exciting, possibly because the melodrama has been resolved in such a way that Kim can focus on what really matters – the crew rescuing Hwang from certain death and by any means necessary. This comes after far too much wheel-spinning in its fairly simple plot to amount to much more than the minimal effort.
Photo courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment
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