WOLMI ISLAND is an interesting film, naturally, as it paints a picture of the Korean War from the side of the North Koreans for a change. This is a fairly small scale war movie in which the narrative focuses down on the attempts by North Korean soldiers to defend their island territory from the overwhelming forces of the imperialist villains, the USA.<br/><br/>For a North Korean movie, this is chock-full of the expected propaganda, hilariously so at the climax when it goes completely over the top during a song in which the soldiers extol the virtue of driving the 'gangsters' from their land. Elsewhere, there's a little action involving the blowing up of ships (good miniature effects) and artillery attacks, plus some tactical stuff as the soldiers attempt to work out how to defend their territory with extremely limited resources.<br/><br/>Unfortunately, a stodgy pacing and a general lack of excitement and action in places serve to drag enjoyment of this film a little, and there's too much back-and-forth stuff in the plot to drag it out. The female lead in particular is a dull, worthy figure who spends too much time moping around and worrying when she should be getting on with stuff; at least the ending is satisfying. WOLMI ISLAND is definitely worth it as a novelty piece, however. Where to start here? Imagine the worst possible Soviet Union Russian war movie - bad plot, trite events, loud and empty slogans, obvious lack of funding, awful music, pathetic dialogues, terrible camera work, predictable lines, predictable deaths, laughs, horrid musical singing number in the middle, pompous funeral scene, unimaginably poor editing, amateurish attempt of bestowing propaganda ideas - all this - now, get it onto North Korea, get it in Korean and voila, you get a monstrously bad war movie with all those smart and wise commanders, comedy-touch fat cooks, Young sweet innocent girls, loud words, laughable battle scenes - and you get a really abysmal result that it is so poor one must virtually fasten seat belts to suffer this abomination all through. No redeeming features here, plain horrid
Neylgaili replied
293 weeks ago