The Plot (spoilers)


Up until the last 5 minutes it was a reasonable movie (not great, but passable, and the body on that Eve... well done, God). But then Kang turned out to be a real alien? WTF?

I wouldn't have a problem with that if the movie had developed more the reasons why Byung-Gu believed in this alien conspiracy, but as it is, it would make a lot more sense if the story was nothing more than a guy killing people who'd done bad things to him, using the alien thing as an excuse.

Some movie twists are an unexpected surprise and add levels of entertainment to an already good story ("Usual Suspects", "Fight Club" and "The sixth sense" gave me goosebumps, for example). But in this case, the twist (Kang being an alien) doesn't add anything. On the contrary, it damages the already weak plot.

IMHO, this movie would have been a lot better had it had less torture (which are not nearly as gory as some reviews will make you think) and more plot development.

reply

Indeed, the end made the movie look silly. Otherwise it could have been a really good movie about the human mind gone wrong.
I suppose you could just disregard the last 5 mins as the protagonists hallucinations or something. One can but hope.

Cheaply bought civil obedience

reply

The whole movie had humorous moments throughout, the ending is just one of them. The point was to show us how helplessly aggressive our kind is, and that violence breeds violence.
The ending was just summing up the moral of the story, and was not afraid to deliver a verdict.
Very solid, from start to finish.

reply

The point of the ending is simply irony. Even after torturing his boss, using meth, and killing his mother... Byeong-gu was completely and absolutely right. There were evil aliens out there who wanted to destroy the planet. Really, after seeing the entire film in all its quarky glory, did you guys really expect a "normal" ending?

reply

[deleted]

I do have a very simplistic attitude when watching movies and I want everything to make sense. To me, if the ending was to make any sense, there should be more hints along the way that the guy was right about the aliens.
As it is, there are no indications as to the reasons why he believes in aliens.

reply

[deleted]

Yeah right. Three of the most over rated movies ever, and you have the nerve to say this movie should make more sense? Way to compare big budget hollywood movies to low budget foreign. Remember, use the magic twig wisely

reply

I dont think the aliens were evil. They were trying to get rid of evil in humans, to stop war, bullying, and hatred for each other. The experiments were made to see if people can change from being bad to good. The aliens destroyed earth as they had given up hope for our silly world we live in. Full of war, greed and nastyness. And at the end it turns out that Byeong-gu was also an experiment that failed. His face appears on screen with, no.1,787: Failure, written underneath.

My foreign film list http://www.imdb.com/list/z86jRjauDwE/

reply

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

The story would be much less interesting if Lee were simply crazy. The crazy torturer / killer has been done to death, so to peak. The crazy person who is nevertheless onto something has not been done nearly as often and is simply an inherently more interesting and complex story. This is a really good version of it.

The movie establishes that he had access to information that would have led him to the existence of the alien conspiracy, and (as pointed out in another reply) at the end we learn that he himself was an experiment. So it's not an arbitrary twist at all.

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.

reply