Shit. I fucked up and accidentally watched a good movie. I'm not gonna beat myself up over it, though. These things happen. The important thing is to move forward and not let it get me down. I probably should have suspected beforehand, because Heaven's Soldiers is Korean. I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but the Koreans know how to make a fuckin' movie. 

Crossover hits like Oldboy and The Host made some noise in the States (and I recommend both of them to the fullest), but there are tons of other great crime, action, and just-plain-fucked-up movies coming out of Korea all the time. 

 The Korean sensibility is almost exactly halfway between the brutal, deadpan style of Japanese yakuza movies and the populist melodrama of Chinese kung-fu flicks. There'll be a quiet scene where two people sit there eating noodles without speaking for two minutes, but then in the next one, two guys in Reservoir Dogs suits will kung-fu the hell out of 50 rollerbladers. It's perfect. (Fuck rollerbladers.)

So yeah, I should have suspected that Heaven's Soldiers was going to be a legitimately good movie, even with its absurd premise: a rogue comet transports a bunch of soldiers and a nuclear warhead back to the 16^th Century, where they meet the greatest hero in Korean history and help him fulfill his destiny. It'd be like if the A-Team went back in time and met George Washington. Corny as hell, right? Honestly, I only bought it because the idea of modern-day soldiers lighting up a gang of ax-toting barbarians with machine guns was too sadistic to pass up.

But then the movie went and taught me some shit. Damn you, movie!

Right from the opening credits, you know you're in for something special because there's a cameo by Kim Jong-Ill, a veteran character actor many of you may remember from the war drama Team America: World Police. He's in some newsreel footage meeting with the leader of South Korea in 2000, a real-life event that the movie presupposes was the launching point of a joint program between North and South to create a nuclear warhead. They succeed, but then in the first scene, the governments decide to turn the nuke over to the U.S. A North Korean major thinks that's a pussy move, so he hijacks the warhead and kidnaps the cute-but-nerdy chick scientist who built it. So then some South Korean soldiers give chase, and during a firefight, a comet passes overhead and they all bamf right into the middle of a Mongol attack on a Korean village.

This part delivers on what I bought the movie for. The soldiers start wasting motherfuckers left and right, thinking they got sent to some kind of Oriental Renaissance Faire. One of them throws a grenade and this Mongol catches it and just looks at it until he gets splattered all over the battlefield. So far, so good.

So then the villagers that they rescued dub them "heavenly soldiers" and assume that they're here to save them from the barbarians, even though all they want to do is go home. You can see where this is going. Then there's a whole bunch of fish-out-of-water comedy as they meet this dude General Lee (so that's where the Dukes of Hazzard got it from!), only he's not a general yet. He's just a ginseng smuggler who failed the military test, which the real General Lee apparently did. So the soldiers have to help him get his groove back so he can grow up to be the great strategist who one day would save Korea from the invading Japanese and get his face put on South Korean currency.

Here's where I started learning shit. When I talk about Korean movies, I'm really talking about South Korean movies. (I hear Kim Jong-Ill is a big film buff, but for some reason, he can't seem to get any of his projects greenlit.) Most of them never even mention North Korea at all, so I kind of forgot that Korea is really one country that's been chopped in two due to political considerations that I couldn't even begin to understand. So a lot of the movie is spent with the two groups of soldiers bickering about their cultural differences, which is interesting, because I don't know fuck all about what North and South Koreans think of each other. Apparently, they don't like each other very much. Maybe a better analogy than the A-Team thing would be if some Union and Confederate troops got sent back in time and met George Washington, and seeing the father of our country made them both realize that even with all of their differences, they're all still American, and that's worth fighting for. I'm pretty sure there would still be room for Mr. T in this scenario, though. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So the bickering soldiers all put aside their differences and stay behind to help General Lee defeat the Mongols, even though the scientist chick figured out when the comet was returning and she needs to get the nuke back to the present before it explodes and destroys the Korean peninsula, which would be a total disaster because then we would all live in a world where the TV show M*A*S*H never existed. Then there's an awesome battle where everybody gets to be noble and badass and die gloriously, but first there are a whole bunch of shots of dozens and dozens of bloodthirsty barbarians getting mowed down by AK-47s. But the problem is that there are hundreds of these fuckers, so when the soldiers run out of bullets, they've got to fight them man-to-man just like anybody else. There's lots of blood and limbs and impalements, plus one completely extraneous CGI shot where the virtual camera bullet-times around all these horses and calvarymen getting shrapneled in slow-mo by a line of claymores. It's awesome in its own way, but it definitely sticks out, because there's barely any CGI in the rest of the movie, just Karo syrup and latex.

Anyway, this sucker should be a lot easier to find nowadays because the Weinsteins finally got off their asses and released it on Dragon Dynasty, so you should definitely check it out. Juicy battle scenes, a little history lesson, some chest-thumping patriotism, and the only "ticking clock" scene I can remember where they don't have to let it beep down to the last second before they shut it off. (I'd tell you exactly when they stop it, except that would be a spoiler and I don't do that shit.)

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Angela Mac   |67.142.161.xxx |2009-05-07 08:33:45 haha LOVED your intro. Hilarious. Who knew we'd adore Korean cinema the way we do? Who knew they could *do* this kind of stuff -- perhaps there's a secret prophecy, and that's what truly prompted us to send the boys over. And sure. You went to the porn shops for the "karate movies". I refrained from reading the entirety of the review, as I would like to be surprised while watching. So, will get back to the rest of it after a viewing. Danke for the heads up of the film!

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