Hope and The Odyssey
This post may contain spoilers for the recent releases Hope and The Odyssey.
One of the biggest changes after moving from Seoul to Bundang was how often I went to the movies. In Mia, where I used to live, there were three theaters within twenty minutes, and my university had an art-house cinema too. When I was bored between classes, or lying around on a weekend when Mom and I found a film we both wanted to see — going to the theater with one friend, with two, sometimes alone, and coming out after two or three hours of being completely absorbed in a story was a kind of time I always loved. Bundang has a CGV and a Megabox too, but getting to a theater with a CGV Arthouse screen meant traveling quite far, and there were no independent cinemas nearby at all. So I went less than before, and unless it was a date or a blockbuster I really wanted to see, trips to the movies dwindled noticeably.
Last year I decided I wanted to go more often and set a goal of watching a movie in a theater at least once a month. I even logged my visits in my bullet journal — The Fall: Director’s Cut, Harbin, Mickey 17, Conclave, Elio.. and there it stopped. I should have gone twelve times; I barely managed five. After that I stopped logging altogether. I’ll watch things when the time comes, I figured — and honestly, there weren’t many films that made me feel I had to seek them out in a theater.
I used to be someone who liked movies quite a lot. In high school I loved listening to “Lee Dong-jin’s Dreaming Attic,” a radio show hosted by the film critic Lee Dong-jin. I followed the films the show introduced and the ones he posted on his blog — films like Holy Motors, The Master, The Grand Budapest Hotel. From 2016 I faithfully kept up with Kim Hye-ri’s Film Club as well; The Green Knight, Maggie’s Plan, and Flow, we watched together. I’ve never been a festival-chasing, deeply learned cinephile, but I felt happy whenever I could sink completely into a story — not observing a film’s structure, plot, or direction from the outside, but finding that at some point I had slipped inside the screen.
And I can’t leave out The Merciless, which I saw more than ten times in theaters in 2017 alone. I still remember the night I happened upon that film and couldn’t go home, circling the lake at Konkuk University over and over. After that first viewing, I watched The Merciless in every kind of theater. CGV Yeongdeungpo’s Starium, which once held the world’s largest screen (it has since become a ScreenX theater); the MX theater at Megabox COEX, where you could hear the crisp footsteps of the prison guards (now a Dolby Cinema); the Haneulyeon Theater at the Busan Cinema Center, whose unusually bright screen revealed corner details I had never noticed; the Myung Films Art Center in Paju, armed with Dolby Atmos and astonishing sound (it closed not long ago); Lotte Cinema’s Super Plex, then the largest auditorium in Korea with some 600 seats… I traveled to theaters all over the country to see that one film. But after his next film, Kingmaker, its director Byun Sung-hyun has worked exclusively with Netflix — Kill Boksoon and Good News were both released only there — and the road to enjoying his films across different theaters faded away. And so my love of moviegoing was reduced to a quota I could barely fill by forcing it into my New Year’s resolutions.
Then, as time went on, along came Hope — director Na Hong-jin’s first film in ten years. The last Na Hong-jin film I had seen was The Chaser, and even that I only encountered as one of the thrillers we middle-school girls put on TV after final exams. All that remained of it was the shocking image of something floating in a fish tank. Then a neighborhood friend — she runs a dog-grooming shop; we met playing squash — suddenly reached out asking me to see Hope with her. All her friends had already seen it and she wanted to as well, but she was too scared to go alone. I had been curious myself, so about five days after it opened, we watched Hope after work at a small neighborhood theater. I hadn’t even watched the trailer, so all I knew was “a Na Hong-jin movie with a monster in it.” Which is why that long opening sequence, some fifty minutes of it, hit me with tremendous suspense — by then I was already a resident of Hopo Port. At the midpoint, when Go Seong-gi’s crew discovered something, I was so startled I whispered to my friend, “Isn’t that a UFO???” And right then a character on screen said exactly the same thing. “Wait, isn’t this a spaceship?” What is this ㅋㅋㅋ I felt completely fused with the movie. We went sprinting along together like that, and at the end, when Kuer’s ship came crashing down, I turned to her again with “WHAT is that???????” Apparently the shot was in the trailer, but I was genuinely stunned. What’s that? What’s this? — and suddenly two hours and forty minutes had passed. What did I just watch? Like nine years ago, when I circled the lake after The Merciless, I nearly stayed up all night thinking about Hope.
A few days later, I saw Hope again in 4DX. The moment I sat down I started grinning. Hope is not a film you watch. It’s a ride. Have I ever laughed this much in a 4DX seat? Is it because the movie is funny? What is this pure distillation of fun? The first time, while Beom-seok spent sixty straight minutes clutching his gun and swearing, I became Beom-seok right along with him — okay, this monster, does it even actually exist? What on earth is it? The second time, in 4DX, I went in already knowing everything down to Bamigir being a kitchen assistant, so I simply surrendered my body to the seat rocking along with Seong-ae’s driving and entered the catastrophe that had descended on Hopo Port. I nearly got flung out of the chair several times and had to grip the armrests tight. (So fun..) With The Merciless, once “Hyung, I’m a cop” arrives you know you’re crossing into part two, and you start feeling sad that the film is ending; in Hope, when the autopsy scene with old Haesul and the clinic director comes, you think, ah, we’re heading into part two now — and it had been a long time since a second viewing made me feel that mounting reluctance for a film to end. Anyway, so fun. So, so much fun.
And a few days after that, I watched Hope yet again in ScreenX after work. Honestly, ScreenX turned out to be 4DX minus the rocking chair, which was a bit of a letdown, but — huh, still fun on the third viewing. The theater was crowded that day, full of first-time viewers, and sharing their reactions was fascinating in its own right. I stepped out for a moment, and when I came back, Seong-gi’s kids were saying “wait, isn’t this a spaceship?” — which cracked me up all over again. Why is this movie so funny? I want to see it in a theater just one more time. One more viewing in Dolby Cinema and I think my wish would be fulfilled.
While I was plotting that one more Dolby viewing of Hope, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened. I hadn’t really kept up with Nolan since Inception and Interstellar, so I wasn’t especially interested in the new one. Still, I had read the Odyssey back when I studied philosophy, and like everyone my age, I belong to the generation that grew up reading Greek and Roman mythology comics, so I was curious how it would be rendered on screen. Mom said she would make chicken soup, so I went over to my parents’ place, impulsively booked tickets, and we saw The Odyssey on a weekend morning. For Hope the theaters had been empty.. for The Odyssey, all three theaters in the neighborhood were packed, and seats were hard to come by — and this wasn’t even an IMAX house, just a small local theater.
The Odyssey runs a full three hours (though Hope is 2 hours 40, so it didn’t feel that much longer). I found the early stretch a bit slow, but once Odysseus’s adventure began — and at the end, returning to the Trojan War and gazing at Odysseus’s face — I felt an unexpected lump in my throat. So Nolan adapted the Odyssey in a completely different way. That’s why it opens with that line about “an age of manifest magic,” I thought. Another reason I loved it was the character of Penelope. She seems veiled, seated elegantly at her loom, but the image of her shouting at Telemachus stayed with me. What are these characters thinking? That, too, is part of the pleasure of watching a film. When it ended, Mom asked ChatGPT to “please list all the gods and spirits that appear in The Odyssey.” Beside her, I asked Gemini about the stories of Circe and Calypso. Stories built on very old myths carry this extra pleasure of reading onward after the credits.
This Friday I’m planning to see The Odyssey once more, in IMAX in Jeonju. I’m curious what I’ll come away with this time. Inception was the first film I ever saw three or more times in a theater, and — whether because of Elliot Page, or because Calypso’s island where Odysseus is trapped looks just like the sea of Limbo — The Odyssey keeps overlapping with Inception in my mind. I’m thinking I should rewatch Inception before I go.
It turns out I don’t need to force “go watch movies in theaters” into a goal — when something delights me, I simply go. Maybe I stopped going because there just weren’t many films that had to be seen in a theater. And it’s a joy to feel I’m rediscovering my own taste. Christopher Nolan, who made The Odyssey, famously uses neither a smartphone nor email (though of course this is possible because his wife, the film producer Emma Thomas, handles everything) and pursues practical effects over computer graphics when shooting; digging up his interviews about this was fascinating too. He said he is not a technophobe, and that refusing the smartphone is an extremely practical defense for protecting his time of creative immersion. He said he carries a basic flip phone only when traveling.
“If I bought an iPhone I would be terribly addicted. I just don’t want to lose those pockets of time I truly treasure — staring out the window, thinking about what the next film might be.” — [The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon]
“The idea that AI will wholesale replace humans and human creativity is nonsense to me. AI models ultimately operate on the creative work humans made in the past.” — [AFP / YouTube interview]
“It’s very interesting, and a very healthy skepticism, that the public — especially younger generations — immediately calls online AI content ‘AI slop’ and quarantines it in a box.” — [The Guardian interview]
“AI is a Trojan horse made of glass. Everyone can plainly see what’s inside — its dangers and its intentions. We must constantly question the motives of those handing us this technology.” — [promotional interview for The Odyssey]
In a recent interview with SBS as well, he reportedly answered that the more the AI era advances, the more the essence of filmmaking — the thing that matters most — remains human creativity. Right, what matters most is human creativity and taste. And thinking about it that way, I realized once again how precious the taste I’ve built over the years — with Lee Dong-jin, with the journalist Kim Hye-ri, with KU Cinematheque and The Merciless — really is. It makes me want to meet more creation and more creativity. So fun, so fun~