Still a perfect movie.
I’ll never forget the experience of watching this for the first time at the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco and hearing the collective gasp of the sold out auditorium when the film first took us down to the basement. I don’t think I heard a single breath again until the credits began rolling. Top 3 theater experience of my life.
This is my favorite Bong Joon-Ho movie, and it’s firmly alongside Parasite in tier one of his filmography. It’s just a masterful showcase of everything that makes Bong Bong: incredible shot compositions, tonal shifts that don’t betray the gravity of his story, and crossing genre boundaries in a particular social and political setting to tell a much bigger story. There’s a pitch-perfect blend of realism and absurdism that occasionally feels missing or unbalanced in his English-language movie.
What struck me…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Early in this film, Jean Tate asks Oppenheimer why he's uncommitted to the communist party and he tells her he likes a little "wiggle room." For the rest of the 3 hours we spend with him, we see him operate in that very wiggle room, and become undone by it.
Through the first two acts, Oppenheimer relishes in the "brilliance" of his wide range of interests (he's "a dilettante, a womanizer, and a suspected communist" as General Groves says to…
Bong’s Korean movies: Perfectly edited and darkly funny thrillers about how living in a capitalist hellscape and police state puts a strain on familial relationships and human desires for happiness, equality, and justice.
Bong’s English-language movies: Rich white people are evil imperialists and need to die. Also here’s 20 minutes of footage that’s not really needed for the story but the American studio is giving me money to do whatever I want. Let’s throw another giant piglike creature in there too.
This is Bong’s third-worst film at best but that’s still a great time at the movies. Pattinson is so fucking funny. What an actor.
