Na Hong-Jin directed The Chaser, which released in 2008. Sudhir Mishra's praise led me to it and I loved it. I remember its foot chase sequences even today. That was Hong-Jin's first feature film. Out in 2026, Hope is only his fourth feature film. Clearly, he is in no hurry to put out films. However, I feel he should put out movies more frequently because, based on The Chaser and Hope, he is a great director.
I got very curious about Hope when it competed in the official selection in the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. A sci-fi action movie competing in the official selection at Cannes shocked me. Would it release theatrically in India? Its genre gave me hope (regular meaning), but I expected the "festival film" tag to hurt the possibility of theatrical release in India. Fortunately, it did release in Bangalore last week and I watched it the day before yesterday. The screen was big, the image quality sharp, and the sound mixing very clear. The theatrical experience of image and sound quality was superlative, one of the best this year.
Hope has extraterrestrials visit and decimate a small harbour town, Hope, in South Korea. At first, we think there is only one alien. After it is taken down just before the intermission, we realise there are aliens. (Note the words 'alien' and 'aliens' because we will return to them.) That's all I'd like to reveal of the story, which is not of much interest to me in this particular movie.
I have read the review by Robert Daniels on Roger Ebert's website and watched the YT review by Christy Lemire and Alonso Duralde. They were disappointed by where the movie went after the intermission but also liked a lot else. They didn't like the interminable road in the final chase, the new team of gun toters who suddenly show up, the aliens' side of the story coming in too late, etc. I noticed while watching the movie all the problems these reviewers have brought up. But I parked them aside because the film was trying to do some other things, which I enjoyed immensely. Let's now discuss everything that I enjoyed.
First, I enjoyed reading the movie as Na Hong-Jin (at least partially) satirising alien invasion movies, violence in movies, etc. This can be seen through examples like the ones that follow.
- The small town of mostly elders has an endless supply of guns and ammunition, and is very well trained in their use. There is even some comedy with a guy having a bow and a quiver of arrows. A policeman questions all the weaponry available to everyone in the small town and the other characters just say something like, "Just shut up and fire!" Through this, Hong-Jin may be telling us that such endless ammo doesn't make sense in action movies but we still buy into this idea in action movies.
- A man heroically takes down an alien and people in the scene praise his shooting skills in an unnaturally excessive way, call him hot, etc. Through this, Hong-Jin may be telling us that the action genre makes violent people attractive.
- There are repeated lines mouthed by characters going something like aliens can't just show up on earth and mess with human life. A kind of patriotism/love for earth is brought in to make us aware that some movies, like the MCU ones, do this with their saving-earth-from-aliens thing. So it's kind of a nod from Hong-Jin to those movies.
From the points I just made, which I realised as the movie was progressing, I felt Na Hong-Jin doesn't want me to think of the movie's story that much. Perhaps the story is the secondary point of the movie. I did feel the movie's story shift in the second half just like the critics did, but I was okay with it because Hope still maintained the high bar set in the first half in the second half. I enjoyed the second half as much as the first half, unlike the critics.
Now that I have made clear that the story didn't matter to me. The following list has the things that did matter to me. I loved the following in Hope.
- The movie hardly has any scenes in the dark, which is a bold move. It allows us to see the bad CGI or other mistakes in visuals. Most other directors keep their monsters in the dark. Here everything is in bright daylight so poor CGI is visible. The bad CGI didn't hamper my experience though because everything happening on screen is so visually and aurally arresting. This again made me feel that the quality of CGI only needs to reach some minimum level to give weight to the story in the action set-pieces. Once this is achieved, I am sucked in. With Hope, despite its poor CGI, I was immersed because the story during the action is so brilliant.
- Hope has a long foot chase before intermission. It reminded me of The Chaser with foot chases in the dark. More movies should have foot chases.
- We get a lot of galloping horses in the extended climax. The scenes with the horses are very thrilling, especially the ones in the forest. The horses looked real; the rider looked real; I was convinced they weren't CGI. I was happy to see a proper horse chase with great sound of hooves after decades. One of the John Wick movies had one, True Lies had one, but nothing like what we have in Hope. These horse scenes in the forest and on the highway are so well shot! I was reminded of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, especially in the forest scenes.
- The insides of the alien spaceship in the forest are such great homage to Alien and Aliens. (We return to these words now.) Characters say "alien" and "aliens" in consecutive sentences. Brilliant! Hong-Jin gives a small nod to Ridley Scott and James Cameron.
- There is an autopsy scene, which is fantastically written and shown. It reminded me of Guillermo del Toro's autopsies in Mimic and Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
- An alien's transformation from one creature to another and this alien chasing a car are what we have seen in Transformers, but done so much better here. All the action in Hope is so cleanly framed and edited making it is easy to follow. Michael Bay's action, on the other hand, is hard to follow. It's like Hong-Jin is correcting in Hope what, for me, went wrong with Transformers.
That was a long list of things I like in Hope. In short, I like the very specific and very novel action (horse chases!). I also like how I could see so many of my favourite directors and their movies in this one movie. I will try to watch it a couple more times in theatres.
The movie ends with the possibility of a sequel, but I feel this is only one interpretation of the ending. Another interpretation is that the sequel hinted at is a joke thrown at the audience. Hong-Jin maybe saying, "You guys will watch anything if a sequel is in the works. So here's a movie, like so many franchise movies, in which I hardly tell you any story but, wait, I promise to tell you so much more in its sequel." I hope we get a sequel to Hope with more novel action or Na Hong-Jin gives us another movie very soon. It would be nice to watch it in a theatre in India.
