Heaven's Soldiers
Director: Min Joon-ki
Year: 2005
Production Company: Sidus FNH Corporation
Running Time: 104 minutes
If you can watch this film and leave any sense
of realism on the doorstep, it’s actually rather fun as it takes the Korean
separation, nukes and long past history all in one big nationalistic and
melodramatic gulp. I have a real weakness for time travel films no matter
what kind and this is as absurd as it gets. Even so, by the end it’s hard
not to get into the spirit of the thing and be rooting for the Koreans
against the dastardly barbarians. It begins though in the future before
it goes into the past. North and South Korea have struck a détente
and have even worked jointly on constructing a nuclear bomb – one that
the woman scientist (Kong Hyu-jin) proudly boasts is a stealth bomb which
they could launch a preemptive attack on the USA! Not sure I like that
idea very much and neither do the governments of the United States, China
and Japan and they demand that it be handed over to be dismantled.
Korea decides reluctantly to comply, but not all
are happy with this decision. A North Korean officer Kang Min-gil (Kim
Seung-woo) feels Korea needs this so that it is never invaded again as
in the past – so he and a small group of his men steal the nuke along with
the female scientist and run away with a force of South Koreans headed
by Park Jeong-wu (Hwang Jung-min) in pursuit. But just as the fight breaks
out a comet swings by overhead and sends them into the past – some 433
years to be precise into the past – and they find themselves smack in the
middle of a barbarian invasion. Using a hand grenade they run the barbarians
off but not before some are killed leaving six men left – 3 from the south
and three from the north and of course the female scientist – you need
at least one woman around to take a bath in the river.
The seven of them try and figure out how this
happened and how to get back to the future – but instead they run into
a small time thief and smuggler who takes all of their arms and hides them.
They discover to their astonishment that his name is Lee Soon-Shin (Park
Joong-hoon) and the year is 1572 during the Josean Dynasty. Their astonishment
is due to the fact that Lee Soon-Shin is Korea’s most famous historical
military leader and some twenty years later he was to defeat the Japanese
in a major naval battle and save Korea from being colonized. But he has
recently failed his military exam (a true fact) and just wants to live
a solitary life – so they take it upon themselves to make him the man he
is supposed to be and also to keep him alive which isn’t easy either –
especially as the barbarians are coming back in force to destroy a small
village and Lee is determined to stop them – with the help of these strange
people. A Magnificent Seven/Seven Samurai motif soon comes into play.
It gets surprisingly – well perhaps not for a
Korean film – violent and deadly as these men from the future become willing
to lay down their lives for a man from the past and for the future (but
their past) of Korea. You might say that is kind of silly because the past
is already set – just let the guy go about his business and history will
take care of itself – but their presence may already have accidentally
altered history. It's not exactly brain food, but it did get me to read
up on Lee and his life is actually quite an interesting one of many failures
but eventually great success when he destroyed the Japanese navy with the
first iron clad ship. He was to die of a bullet wound in 1598 at the battle
of Noryang – if only he had listened closer to one of the men’s warnings!
Full of nationalistic pride, the film delves deep into melodrama, sacrifice
and heroics with little more than the shell of characters but it’s still
rather entertaining and somewhat touching by the end.
My rating for this film: 6.5
Trailer
Reviewed: 01/06
Previous films from Director:
This was his debut film.
