6/45 (2022)
IMDb is runtime of 1 hour and 54 minutes, rated 6.9 by 1301 cinematizens.
Genre: Comedy; Species: musical.
DNA: South Korean.
Verdict: Manse!
Tagline: Winning isn’t everything.
It takes nerve to make a comedy with K-Pop musical interludes set in the most heavily armed border in the world, the misnamed Demilitarized Zone, which has more than a million heavily-armed, highly-trained soldiers poised for action along its 250 kilometres length, separated by no more than four kilometres at any one place. The DMZ is itself extensively mined by the armies of both Koreas in disregard of the treaty and though it is forbidden by the terms of the treaty both sides patrol in it…at night and plant those mines. Meanwhile there are eyes in the sky overhead in geostationary low earth orbits and down below the ground are equally forbidden tunnels. There have been many shooting incidents in these environs only a few of which are ever reported. While there were escapes over, under, and through the Berlin Wall, there have never been any such breaches of the DMZ.
A winning lottery ticket brings together a microcosm of those million soldiers in that environment, four North Koreans and three South Koreans. To retrieve the ticket wind-born into the north, the ROKs (that is, Republic of Korea soldiers) plan a military operation: analyse the enemy, probe, assess, decide on tactics, prepare, train, equip for stealth, and engage. But the KPAGFs (figure it out) have home court advantage.
Twists, turns, irony, and so it goes. Beneath the armies’ discipline, the suffocating propaganda, and cultural alienation of generations, they are all the same.
It’s longer than my usual watch-time but it whizzed along with plenty of laughs, offering insight into the Koreas where I spent a few months once upon a time at Korea University. I made two visits to the DMZ, set foot in North Korea, and walked through one of those tunnels. The title above refers to the lottery ticket draw.
It echoes, deliberately it would seem, JSA (2000), a deadly serious study of the differences between the Koreas and the Koreans in the DMZ. Like this movie, JSA is entirely Korean, ignoring the elephantine US Eighth Army of occupation.