The gore-drenched opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan may not have had much effect on the eagerness with which the world goes to war, but it's had an undeniable impact on the way war gets depicted onscreen. A film with no polite cutaways and with an explosion for virtually every scene, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood Of War attempts to portray the horrors of the Korean War though simple immersion. Bullets whiz, limbs fly, skulls burst, and no one walks into the sunset toward a happy ending.
Previously responsible for the taut action thriller Shiri, writer-director Kang Je-gyu borrows a lot from Ryan, even importing its drippy present-day framing device to set up the story of two brothers whose quiet life changes irrevocably with the onset of war. Fleeing a North Korean invasion, simple shoeshine man Jang Dong-Gun and his college-bound brother Won Bin are forcibly enlisted to fight the communists. Continuing a lifetime of sacrifice, Jang volunteers for one dangerous mission after another on the vague promise that doing so will make life easier for his more delicate brother.
This allows Kang to take his film through some explosive setpieces, and, as with Shiri, he repeatedly proves he has fine technical chops. He steers the camera into battle while capturing each speck of flying dirt, making war look neither thrilling nor glorious, only terrifying. Sadly, Kang seems not to have noticed that without the quiet moments between shrapnel barrages, Ryan wouldn't have been half as memorable. After a sentimental opening sequence, he scarcely lets the film pause to breathe, which dulls its effectiveness. After a while, it becomes too easy to entertain thoughts like "Oh, so that's what brains would look like on a dirt floor."
Kang has chosen his cast well, particularly Jang, a singer and model with a haunted look and a striking screen presence. If Kang had given his actors a meatier, less cliché-dependent story, it might have worked out better. (When one soldier proudly passes around a snapshot of his family, his company members should just go ahead and break out the shovels.) Of course, it might be that war simply invites clichés, but while it's easy to admire Kang's attempts to bring those clichés back home, and to impart his country's history in the epic language of classic war films, the results still ring a bit too familiar.