Bong Joon-ho's Oscar-winning "Parasite" has drawn attention to Korean cinema. I had seen some Korean movies prior to that, but I just saw this one, and it deserves special mention.
The Korean War was the first military conflict of the Cold War; one might call it a proxy war in the Cold War. We may have heard countless stories about what went on or what the motivations were, but we don't often hear what it was like to be in the middle of the war. Jang Hoon's "Go-ji-jeon" ("The Front Line" in English) looks at that. What I took from the movie is essentially the same thing that John Sayles's "Men with Guns" said: to the people caught in the middle of the war, there's no difference between either side. As the character in Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" said, anyone with a gun is the enemy.
It's got some of the most intense battle scenes that I've seen. And on top of it, the Korean War only ended with a truce, so it's technically ongoing, just without active combat. This is one movie that I definitely recommend.
The Korean War was the first military conflict of the Cold War; one might call it a proxy war in the Cold War. We may have heard countless stories about what went on or what the motivations were, but we don't often hear what it was like to be in the middle of the war. Jang Hoon's "Go-ji-jeon" ("The Front Line" in English) looks at that. What I took from the movie is essentially the same thing that John Sayles's "Men with Guns" said: to the people caught in the middle of the war, there's no difference between either side. As the character in Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" said, anyone with a gun is the enemy.
It's got some of the most intense battle scenes that I've seen. And on top of it, the Korean War only ended with a truce, so it's technically ongoing, just without active combat. This is one movie that I definitely recommend.