Monsters take Korea
wwww

This is a movie that's hard to sum up. 'Little Miss Sunshine meets Godzilla' was my first attempt, but even that doesn't seem right. 'A Korean monster movie/family drama with some politics and some humour thrown in' comes close to summing it up, but still not quite.

It's easy to sum up the impact the film had on me, though, which was 'Wow'.  Less than ten minutes into the film and the monster appears in all its glory in the broad daylight beside the Han River, rampaging through crowds of tourists, eating and maiming people. It's horrifying and exciting and bizarrely realistic: this is exactly what would happen, you suspect, if a geniune giant amphibian really did show up. Not that it's likely to, but then again this movie is based on actual events, so who knows...

The protagonists of this film are the Park family: father/grandfather Heui-bong (Byeon Heui-bong), archery champion Nam-ju (Bae Du-na), unemployed alcoholic Nam-il (Park Hae-il), and the goofy, lazy Gang-du (Song Gang-ho). The fifth member is Gang-du's young daughter Hyeon-seo (Ko A-sung), who is the glue that holds the decidely dysfunctional Parks together. In the inital attack, she is snatched away by the monster right in front of her horrified father, and all of the remaining family members must fight to get her back. That's the plot in a nutshell, anyway, but it twists and turns around a lot from there. I would warn you not to get too attached to any of the characters, but chances are that you will anyway- they all feel like real people, with failings and triumphs alike. They're not Hollywood heroes, not by a long shot, which is what makes them so appealing.

In their quest, the Park family face many obstacles, the least of which is escaping the hospital they're confined to and hitting the road. And they do, of course, face the monster again, but the film makes it clear that the monster, terrifying though it my be,  isn't this film's real Big Bad- it's an animal, it's only doing what it has to in order to live. No, what this film is railing against is authority and it's misuse -and not just the American goverment (it plays a big role in this film), though it does come in for a kicking. Bureaucracy and incompetence are the enemies here. The government suspects that the monster was 'host' to a deadly virus; when an American man dies they become even more convinced- and yet when it seems they are wrong they refuse to back down, blundering on ahead anyway. (Remind you of anything?) But average people are the heroes of this film: average Americans won't be short of things to relate to. Everyone gets screwed over by the government sometimes, and if it's not your own government doing the screwing it'll be somebody else's. Or both.

The middle half of this film is admittedly a bit flabby, and the ending is...probably not what you'd expect, but this is almost certainly one of the best monster movies of the decade. And please, for the love of whatever deity you do or don't subscribe to, no American remake. No remake whatsoever. Please. And if by the time you're reading this they've gone and made one, kindly ignore it and hire this instead. You won't be disappointed.

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