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Framesofnick3.0

Movie ended like I ran out of quarters

Joe A4.5

Really appreciate when a director fully understands and exploits the cinematic value of horses.

demi adejuyigbe4.5

It's Aliens. It's Transformers. It's Fury Road. It's Predator. It's Magnificent Seven. It's Avatar. It's about ten different run-and-gun arcade cabinet games in the corner of a Dave & Busters. It's got ten characters and zero arcs. It's a beautifully shot and surprisingly funny movie with terrific stunt work and monsters somewhat stymied by the very animation that makes them so terrifying. It's got three of the craziest casting decisions I've ever seen. It's captivating from start to finish, and the tone of that "captivating" shifted about ten times from the last 30 minutes to the hour and a half after the movie finished for me. Huge huge fan of Hong-jin's previous movie The Wailing, which still holds the honor of being the only film that scared me so much I had to stay awake after watching it, and primed me to believe that this movie would be smarter than its reputation. Which is maybe why I think this movie is kind of a brilliant send-up of action films.One of my least favorite tropes is when a movie says something akin to "this isn't a movie" to try and express the seriousness of its own ideas. It literally never works– and this movie doesn't do that at all. But it does something similar in the final act that absolutely works, and unlocked a moment I was a little confused by early on: Hoyeon's introduction. A staggering western gunslinger intro for a yet-unseen character, shot with the energy of an action star breaking into frame. You can almost hear the "Kashmir." An intro quickly upended by her personality being as bumbly and unsure as everyone else's. Both this moment and the movie star moment later on are subverted by their immediate aftermath and the sort of "reveal" of the movie's final moments.On the surface it's a crazy, high-octane cowboys versus monsters thriller, but there's a lot of subtle politics in the film that bely a greater theme. The running gag of everybody's unexplained stockpile of guns. The billboards asking citizens to report spies. Multiple moments where you realize things would've gone differently if every character wasn’t so trigger happy. The entire story is set off by a single shot fired at something someone didn't understand. The creatures do not set out to kill. They even approach softly with kinder faces, as if to try and reason. But in the world we’ve created, and the worlds we’ve created as allegories for our own, an unknown force is automatically a destructive one. And even when it's shown that our violence will not stop an oncoming force, it’s all we can do to try and control it. Keep shooting. Keep reloading. You must hope the bullets will kill before you ever have hope the bullets aren't necessary.