How Bong Joon-ho Can Change Your Life
One of Korea’s most standout filmmakers is about to go global - here’s why you should definitely know who he is, and how he just might change your life.
There really isn’t anyone out there quite like Bong Joon-ho. Sure, there’s filmmakers, and plenty of them. There’s a whole bunch of other Korean filmmakers too – a lot of good ones – but very, very few have managed quite what Joon-ho has. He’s not the guy who made Oldboy, and most of his films have struggled to make their way over here to the UK, which is probably why (if you’ll pardon the hipster pun), you’ve never heard of him. But here, in however many words, is why you should definitely start paying attention to his work, and how he could, quite possibly, change your life, just as he did mine.
I was a teenager when I saw Joon-ho’s The Host for the very first time, and, rather understandably, I had no idea who he was, what it was about, or even really that the large majority of its dialogue was in Korean. All I saw was one thing: a monster. A monster totally unlike any I had seen at the time; smaller than Godzilla, and King Kong, of indeterminate species, and a million miles from the hammy, rubber-suited aliens I had grown up being so fond of. This indescribable ‘monster’ was The Host’s first calling card, a love-letter to the classic creature-feature genre where it made its nest. The same, but different. But beyond that, it became something entirely original.
The Host isn’t really a film about a gigantic monster that wreaks havoc on Seoul. I mean, that definitely happens (and plenty of havoc there is too), but above all else, it’s a movie about family. An extraordinarily dysfunctional family that are struggling to hold it all together, and the only way they can do so, is to team-up and fight off a totally bonkers-looking sea creature. It’s not afraid to be funny, or be emotionally traumatising, or be both, at exactly the same time.
With The Host, I finally found a film that wasn’t afraid to stand up to the worldwide genre rulebook. Joon-ho proved to me that you could make a monster movie that wasn’t exactly the same as every other monster movie that had ever existed before it. That you could embrace genre, but still be entirely original in the process.
So I started hunting down all of his other films soon after, and you can no doubt guess from reading this far that I wasn’t disappointed with what I found. Time and time again, whether it be an ultra dark police thriller (Memories of Murder), a moving family drama (Mother), or a balls-to-the-wall, post-apocalyptic action movie set entirely on a train (Snowpiercer); Joon-ho was twisting and shaping the genres I had grown to know so well, into something completely out of the ordinary.
There’s something hugely comforting about genre: knowing what to expect, that you aren’t wasting your time and, more importantly, that everything will be tied together rather neatly in the end. That you will indeed get some form of catharsis. Watching a Bong Joon-ho movie has that familiar level of comfort. You know The Host is a monster movie, so of course, there’ll be a monster, and there’ll be mayhem. He’s totally embracive of genre. But with Joon-ho, you also get an extra layer; something very, very special. Something called ‘surprise’, that doesn’t seem to have existed en masse in mainstream genre movies since, well, since the whole thing first started up.
Even with his latest, the Netflix-backed Okja, what looks set to be another ‘girl and her dog’ style adventure story (just with a gigantic, genetically-engineered pig instead of the dog), there’s already huge amounts of political satire and other genre extras woven into the trailer alone.
The second you learn to embrace thinking like Joon-ho’s; that not everything has to be the same as the tried-and-tested formula that came before it, the second you can really learn to live. To take risks, to hold on to what you love, but be different at the same time, and to ultimately embrace what it means to be a creative.
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