Movie Gazette

China, 1375. The newly established Ming dynasty is driving its predecessor, the Yuans, back to the Mongol plains. Amidst these tensions a small Korean peace delegation finds itself banished to the North of China by the Mings. Barely themselves surviving a Yuan attack that wipes out their Ming escort, the Koreans embark upon the impossible journey back home across the punishing desert. After encountering a troop of Yuan cavalrymen who are holding the Ming princess Bu-yong (Zhang House of Flying Daggers Zi-yi) captive, the Koreans decide to rescue her and take her home to Nanjing instead, hoping that her deliverance will restore to them the favour of the Mings. Yet the fearsome Yuan general Rambulhua (Yu ‘Iron Monkey’ Rong-kwong) has taken a blood-oath to recapture the princess, and it soon becomes clear that the remaining Koreans will have to take one last desperate stand in the middle of nowhere against the superior numbers of their enemy.

Kim Sung-su’s ‘The Warrior’ is the first South Korean film to have been shot in cinemascope, offering vast desert panoramas the likes of which have not been seen since David Lean’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962). This unforgiving ochre sandscape, and later a perilous forest and a wintry coastal fortress, become the settings for epic struggles – an arduous journey homewards, and a siege war fought over a woman – in the grand tradition of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ and ‘Iliad’. In fact ‘The Warrior’ is everything that the recent Homer-inspired Troy (2004) should have been – for it has all the sublime spectacle and vicious skirmishing of Wolfgang Petersen’s film, but none of the sentimental melodrama or cheesy dialogue. And thanks to meticulous production design and astonishingly vivid performances all round, its heroes really do look like homesick, battle-weary desperadoes rather than comfortable actors let loose on a big set.

In ‘The Warrior’, events move very fast, situations explode into chaos without warning, and fighting is bloody and brutal, but the film always remains firmly focussed on the individuals caught up in the action, bringing their contrasting characters together to create a complex portrait of heroism. The deadliest of the Koreans is the spearman Yeo-sol (Jung Woo-sung), but as a recently freed slave he takes orders from nobody – especially not from the young general Choi (Joo Jin-mo), whose thirst for glory is matched only by his imperiousness, self-doubt and lack of concern for the welfare of others. The fierce loyalty of the older lieutenant Ga-nam (Park Jung-hak) to his general is tested to its limits, while the veteran archer Jin-lip (Ahn Sung-ki) just wants to get as many of his men home alive as possible. The Mongol Rambulhwa, on the other hand, nobly carries out a sworn duty which he knows to be futile, and far from being portrayed as a villain, is very much the Koreans’ heroic equal, flaws and all. As these five warriors come into confrontation with one another, with the princess, and with a host of unusually well-delineated minor characters, ‘The Warrior’ reveals a rich strand of humanism and psychological insight reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s classic ‘The Seven Samurai’ (1954) – no small accomplishment for a writer/director as young as Sung-su, for whom this is an extraordinary feature debut.

In short, ‘The Warrior’ is one of the two finest war epics, along with Terrence Malick’s ‘The Thin Red Line’ (1998), to appear in the past twenty five years. Realistic, subtle and relentlessly grim, it captures the essence of war in all its blood and glory.