Critica sin filtro

Hope achieved something very few films manage to do with me: for a good portion of its two-hour-and-forty-minute runtime, it had me completely hooked. And perhaps that is precisely why its final stretch pissed me off so much.

The film begins as an excellent science-fiction thriller. A small Korean town is confronted with an inexplicable event, and information is revealed intelligently: first we know something is happening, then we discover the creatures, then we realise there is more than one, and eventually we find a crashed spacecraft. Each revelation expands the mystery without destroying it.

And in the middle of all this comes Jung Ho-yeon, providing a perfect lesson in how to introduce a badass character. Nobody needs to tell us how extraordinary she is, show us her résumé, or explain what she can do. We simply watch her act and discover it for ourselves. A character is not badass because the script tells you so. They have to prove it.

The early action sequences are excellent, and it is important to distinguish visual effects from practical stunt work. Some of the VFX are far from convincing, but what the stunt drivers do with the cars is something else entirely. Some of those manoeuvres and crashes are genuinely spectacular.

The problem begins when the film enters its interminable final chase. What had previously been action that moved the story forward becomes repetition: run, shoot, scream, run again, shoot again. And then an even bigger problem appears: the physical rules governing the aliens change according to what the screenplay needs.

These creatures can move at astonishing speeds, yet later they cannot catch a car, people running on foot, or even a horse galloping down a road.

Apparently, the aliens' speed and strength are inversely proportional to the importance of the character they are chasing.

And just when we expect some kind of conclusion, the film decides to open another movie instead. A gigantic mothership falls from the sky, an extraterrestrial hierarchy is introduced, there is an emperor, new characters played by Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender appear, and suddenly an entire mythology emerges just as the film is ending.

Which only creates more questions. What brought down a ship that enormous? How does an object of that size enter the atmosphere over South Korea without triggering a military response? Where is the Korean military? And does a civilisation capable of interstellar travel really have no auxiliary vehicles or smaller craft, forcing its creatures to chase people and horses on foot?

We know Na Hong-jin considers this only the first half of the story and intends to continue it. Fine. That explains the ending. It does not justify it.

The audience paid to watch this film, not half of a film whose continuation may arrive who knows when. And the elements introduced at the end create frustration rather than mystery.

A film can leave questions unanswered. The problem begins when those questions no longer make you eager to discover the answers, but instead make you feel that part of the film you paid to watch is missing.

Hope had an extraordinary film in its hands.

And then it flushed it down the toilet.