Jimin Chung

When I first heard about this movie, I was told (by Koreans) that this was a propaganda film meant to "make Japanese look less evil", but now that I watched the whole film, I like it very much. Especially now when politics between Korea and Japan are uneasy, it gives me a lot to think about. There are multiple historical inaccuracies in the film, but the actors excellently performed in depicting "humans" instead of obvious fictional characters - for the most part. Noda - someone who was evil and twisted all along - cried out "mom" as he died. Jong-dae - a man who seemed only to care about saving his own skin - his last words were "Stay right still. Do not, do not go out there." said to Jun-shik, telling him to play dead after stopping him from getting back on his feet. Even though I thought that Jun-shik, a Korean, was the main character all along, the twist near the end - the fact that Tatsuo was actually the main character that survived until the end - was quite a shock. The movie did well to show how Tatsuo was changed over time as well. In my personal opinion, the despair Tatsuo showed when he was reminded of his own actions during Khalkhin Gol battle through seeing the Soviet officer forcing the penal battalion to go out and fight in Dedovsk was the peak of this movie. Some of the negative reviews mention the continuous adversity between Koreans and Japanese soldiers & nationalistic propaganda, but if you really know anything about Korean-Japanese relationship, you would know that those were done mostly right. Living in Korea, it's extremely hard to find any movie, drama or anything (that deals with story set during the Japanese occupation of Korea) with as little bias as this movie. But then again, it's hard for one to know unless they're following the issue of Korean-Japanese relationship through both Korean and Japanese narratives. All of the seemingly majestic scenes on the Japanese Imperial Army's side was intentionally delivered to create ambivalence, so any argument of this movie "glorifying Japan" would be invalid to make. I'm not sure why so many people fall into that trap. (Although many might think that Noda being such an obviously evil superior towards the Korean conscripts is a bit of an exaggeration, they should be more surprised that it was just Noda and not many else. Historically, any Koreans in such situation would have been immediately killed or tortured in multiple brutal ways.) It's not only Tatsuo that experiences the stage of being an overly authoritarian monster. Jong-dae, while in Soviet concentration camp, shows the same face as Tatsuo did in the Japanese Imperial Army. Part of the movie's message is that regardless of nationality, power can make monsters out of people. The only thing that threw me off was Shirai, the Chinese sniper acted by Fan Bingbing. How she was introduced to and removed from the plot were not as smooth, they could have been much better. It was almost as if she was there only for the sake of including a Chinese character in the movie. She was there for all the right reason, the execution was just a bit poor. The suicide bombing thing in the battle of Khalkhin Gol was also a bit too much of fiction, but I care more about how the scene contributes to building up the story than how accurate the military equipment was and so on, so it actually wasn't that bad.