Sure, you can outrun a tsunami...
Disaster movies follow a certain formula. There is the perfunctory introduction of characters who are written in broad strokes to make it easy for the audience to identify the heroes, the survivors and the doomed. Amongst these will be a family man, spurred onto heroic deeds by a limited imagination that reduces an existential threat to humanity as an imminent threat to his own loved ones. His family has usually already been torn apart by his own lack of attention to it; it’s as though he don’t know what he’s got til it’s gone (and even fails to notice that it’s gone). There’s a expert of some sort who provides exposition as to the nature and potential destructiveness of the looming disaster with some pseudo-scientific jargon that rarely seems plausible. Comic relief usually comes in the form of a bumbling character who always seems to survive in spite of making some fairly risky choices (to say their survival is against the odds is not just cliche, but a redundancy – everything in these films is against the odds).
Plot exposition is as superficial as the introduction of characters, and these two facets are rarely integrated. Disaster movie scripts zoom through this phase because – let’s face it – we’re paying for the destruction, not the human insight. That’s what makes disaster flicks such good big-screen-bucket-of-popcorn viewing. On DVD, they are the kinds of films you can happily rent for a Sunday night, knowing that you won’t be agonising over the meaning at work the next day.
The Korean tsunami film, Haeundae, shows that adhering to the template doesn’t mean that the result will be a generic, where-in-the-world, shopping mall product. Still, much of what makes it original also makes it odd. I’m not knowledgeable when it comes to Korean culture, so I can’t call “Korean-ness” with any certitude, but there were some similarities with other Korean films I’ve seen.
There was a lot of slapstick, with an emphasis on the slap. Characters hit one another with very little provocation (and friendships seemed to survive these relatively violent assaults). Our introduction to the beach resort of Haeundae was with an elderly woman first verbally abusing, then physically attacking a much younger woman. I’m guessing it was playing for laughs, but the gruesome old hag seemed to have the upper hand – her son had to keep intervening – and the only other times we saw the old woman she was casually insulting her son and his friends. The coming of the tsunami was signalled with a gull crashing head first through a windscreen, and then flapping its wings more and more slowly as it died. There were playing-to-the-dress-circle facial expressions that made the Stooges look like minimalists by comparison.
There was screaming. Sure, there is screaming in American disaster movies, but not with the intensity that there was here. Sustained, high-pitched screaming from a range of characters… and this was before the tsunami was even raised as a possible threat to their coastal existence. The hero’s mother, whose name I didn’t catch (the gruesome old hag mentioned earlier), was introduced screaming at the heroine (Yeon-heui) for selling fish on the footpath outside her restaurant. She transferred her screeching anger to her son (our hero, Man-Sik), for being on Yeon-heui’s side when he tried to break up the fight between his mother and the poor girl. Another character, Hi-mi, screamed (appropriately, I guess) when she fell off a boat, and perhaps it’s because I really had no idea what her character was doing in the film but in my memory she didn’t seem to stop screaming, even during the scenes where she was trying to seduce her rescuer.
Character development is not a strong point of any disaster movie, but I was left wondering whether there were character archetypes that a Korean audience would recognise; whether, perhaps, there were some Woody Harrelsons in the cast that rendered additional exposition unnecessary since they’d be playing to a widely acknowledged type. The student, Hi-mi, and her two girlfriends were characters I felt didn’t make sense as played or subtitled. When they were introduced, they were on the beach, an unlikely threesome with a grotesque, overweight, badly-bespectacled girl and a conventionally attractive girl bitching about the fact that the third, Hi-mi, would be scaring off the boys with her determined studying. Hi-mi’s the nerdy student type seemed to be the message here. Then she finished her work, sat up and the three were soon picked up by three boys and taken on a cruise of the harbour where she nearly drowned, was rescued, seemed to think she should receive compensation from her rescuer, and… well… none of it really made sense to me.
The other main departures from the template were the prologue and the survivors. The prologue was set on a Korean fishing boat, in 2004, in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Indonesia. Ring any bells? Yes, the swelling seas that our fishermen were battling were, in fact, the Boxing Day tsunami. Too soon? It felt like it. As for the survivors, there were far fewer than in an equivalent American film. I had identified most of the main characters as, say, the John Cusack, the Chiwetel Ejiofor, the Jake Gyllenhall etc and was surprised when some of them didn’t make it to the unexpectedly emotional memorial service.
For a BDM, it provided a decent Saturday night’s entertainment. It didn’t have the chortle factor of, say, a 2012, but even taking into consideration my twitchiness at the 2004 tsunami references, it didn’t leave the uncomfortable feeling. I’d probably see another Korean disaster movie, but I’d see Host again first.
