Hope

HOPE   ***

Na Hong-jin

2026

IDEA:  Near the DMZ in South Korea, a destructive alien invasion prompts police and other residents to take up arms.

BLURB:  For the first hour or so of Na Hong-jin’s Hope, the threat facing a small South Korean village is entirely unseen. Police chief Ko Bum-seok wanders trepidatiously through abandoned streets and hollowed-out buildings, rifle always at the ready, while a civilian militia unloads ammunition into the horizon, to no effect. More than a classical withholding of the monster reveal, Na’s strategy of delay and visual obfuscation begins working as a metaphor for the way society turns the unknown into the enemy. When we do get a full look at the aliens, rendered in CGI that ranges from fiercely uncanny to plasticky-silly, Na emphasizes just how much they’re like us, and how little that matters. Risking cliché, it’s humanity that’s the monster, something Hope continually and mordantly underlines as our ragtag group of bellicose protagonists fire a barrage of projectiles at their foe (and sometimes fellow), all while finding ample time to squabble with and insult each other. The action sequences in Hope are exhilarating, brought together through propulsive tracking shots, crisp editing and sound design, and eye-popping stunt work. Na makes up for the sometimes wobbly CGI with an acute sense of the aliens’ physics, their superhuman velocity and strength, the way they sloppily barrel through walls as if sliding through melted butter and fling heavy objects like toothpicks. As indicated by all the signs of abjection (secretions, excretions, foul smells), Hope is concerned with the flimsiness of the symbolic walls we put up to keep out Otherness. If the film is overextended and often repetitive, it jibes pretty well with how unceasingly society keeps fighting that losing battle.