Straight off the bat I can say that the most anticipated
Korean blockbuster of 2011, aside from Christmas’ war epic
My Way from Jang
Je-gyu, is easily the worst film I’ve seen all year, no matter how you look at
it. It’s very easy to see what went
wrong, one bad decision was made after another, with barely any right ones in
between. What is not so easy to
understand is
how things went
wrong. Though I would not label
Sector 7’s filmmakers as the cream of the crop, they normally seem to know what
they’re doing and consistently deliver solid, if overly sentimental fare. They are endowed with a keen ability to
whet Korea’s insatiable appetite for melodrama.
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| Oil rig bonding |
Curiously, there is little to no melodrama in
Sector 7. It hints at it a few times but seems to
abandon it in favor of concocting a copycat medley of rehashed Hollywood plot
devices and production techniques.
It is truly a triumph of expectation over delivery as I cannot imagine
any producer seeing a cut of this expensive bomb and proclaiming “We have a hit
on our hands!” The film’s
pre-release exposure was enormous, everyone (at least in Korea and on the
internet) knew about it being the first Korean 3D IMAX film, numerous posters
and trailers were available, and the entertainment rags were all talking up Ha
Ji-won’s arduous workout regimen. When
the day came, it opened very strong before the poisonous word of mouth pulled
it right back out of theaters within weeks.
Clearly it was the intent of Yoon Je-kyoon (producer/writer) and Kim Ji-hoon (director) to copy every
similar film that had met with a lot of success in the hope that their
synthetic product would also be a big hit. Ha Ji-won is basically an Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver’s
iconic character in the Alien franchsie) stand-in, the oil rig is from
Armageddon (1998), a major character’s death and resurrection is lifted from
the first Lord of the Rings, the genesis of the monster is not dissimilar to
Korea’s own The Host (2006), and the list goes on.
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| Ha Ji-won, tough as nails... apparently |
In fact, the film is a veritable cornucopia of
metanarratives. Curiously, aside
from lifting all of its plot elements, characters, set-pieces, and effects from
other movies, it also has a link to the popular K-Drama
Secret Garden (2010)
which ends with Ha Ji-won’s stuntwoman character being given the script of
Sector 7. Clever synergy? I suppose so. Even stranger is that her characters in both the show and
the film are identical. Women that
are physically strong but emotionally weak and incapable of making
decisions. Stranger still is that her tragically deceased father is incarnated by Jeong In-gi in both. Everything about
Sector
7 is constructed, even the sets aren’t real as most of it was shot on green
screen. As a result it barely
feels like a film and the chief cause of this is just how badly it is made.
Unlike Yoon’s previous blockbuster, the tsunami-themed
Haeundae (2009),
Sector 7 spares little time for scene-setting and character
development. A brief underwater intro features a pair of oil drillers setting
in place a pipe. A couple of little glowing creatures swim around them, suddenly they attack and one of the men falls to his death. Fast forward to the present where
we are directly introduced to the hardy (but strangely Spartan) crew of an oil
rig. They are battling with a
malfunctioning pipe and being doused in brute petroleum, no doubt reinforcing
the intrinsic bond between them. Cha Hae-joon (Ha Ji-won) is pretty but tough as nails and shows grit alongside
the men. A couple of scenes
explore the relationships between the rig’s crewmen (and woman), which is to
say that nothing happens. One of
those glowing creatures is found and then Anh Suh-kee (Hae-joon’s mentor) comes
aboard to aid the exploration of the new underwater oil fields. Of course he knows more than he lets on
and blah blah blah blah blah…
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| The first of many oil rig bike scenes |
What is it that can make a film go oh so wrong? B-movies, as I’ve explored in my
I Am a Dad review, benefit from lowered expectations. Conversely, when you suffocate the nation’s media outlets
for a month, touting your bigger-than-anything-you’ve-ever-seen-before-it
blockbuster, you suffer from heightened expectations. When you go down the latter route but produce a film on
par (or below, as is the case) with the former course, you’re left with a big
problem that is pretty much irreparable.
You’ve promised something spectacular and eventful but have completely
failed to deliver. Worse than a
bad filmmaker, this makes you a liar.
More than anything else, and there’s a lot, two things
bothered me the most about
Sector 7.
One is the incomprehensibly bad rear-projection technique used in the
bike sequences, of which there are four… on an oil rig. The quality is what you would expect
from the 30s or 40s not 2011, worse still is watching Ha Ji-won madly rev the
bike and swoop down to her left and right sides, she actually looks like a
little 6-year-old boy pretending to ride in a Grand Prix. Yoon, who also
produced this summer’s
Quick, seems to have a bike fetish.
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| Sacrifice: LOTR style |
The second, and perhaps more upsetting point, is the film’s
latent mysoginy. Hae-joon embodies
both male and female traits, the problem is that the male traits are the hero
ones, and the female traits are all ugly stereotypes. Additionally, for a film that attempts to make Ha Ji-won a consummate action star by pitting her as a conquering heroine
against a vicious antagonist, the heroics are mostly reserved for the men. Throughout the film, they are
repeatedly sacrificing themselves, one of the characters does so twice! Another
does so to save his friend, in what I’m assuming is supposed to be an emotional
scene (no such luck). After he
does so, his friend remains rooted to the spot, whimpering, not trying to
escape and is then quickly impaled. In more able hands this might have been a clever send-up but
no such attempt is made here, which begs the question, what was the point?
If you decide to get on board Sector 7, here’s what you can
expect: wild lapses in logic, rampant misogyny, numerous laughably atrocious
rear-projection motorcycle sequences, complete disregard for the natural laws
of physiques, risible dialogue and matching delivery, an ugly monster that is
never hidden from view, and perpetual references to superior films that it
could never hope to match. Your
choice…
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