Emergency Declaration
A lot of Americans agree that Korean zombie movies are really cool.
I’m sure you’ve watched, or at least heard of a few big titles yourself: Train to Busan, All of Us Are Dead, you get it.
The point was, I’ve heard about how excellent Korean zombie movies were to the average American viewer, so I was pretty excited when my mom announced that we were going to be watching a Korean virus-related movie called Emergency Declaration.
To my disappointment, after a quick Google search, I found that Emergency Declaration was not a zombie movie. It was just a boring, everyday film about a bioterrorism attack perpetrated by a guy who went insane after his mom died, on a plane packed with more than a hundred passengers.
Anyway, the first thing I noticed when my mom put on the movie was not the well-done camera angles, the sociopathic tendencies of the future bioterrorist, or the little kid who was going to be the deuteragonist of the movie.
Instead, I stood up, pointing at the screen, yelling, “Hey, it’s the Squid Game guy!”
Indeed, it was Lee Byung-hun, or the guy who played the Frontman. His more significant role, however, was of course Gwi-Ma in K-Pop Demon Hunters. He was in both films as the overarching antagonist, so it was kind of funny and slightly jarring to see him in the role of a slightly flustered father trying to take his daughter to Hawaii.
The general synopsis goes a little something like this: The plane is boarded, and bioterrorism commences. A deadly virus is released onto the plane, and it’s extremely infectious and lethal, killing someone within an hour of exposure.
The movie was, to put it straight, amazing. Perhaps it was just good. Or perhaps it was the cultural nuance that influenced it. American movies don’t really have as strong a pull on family as Korean movies do, and that was a large factor in the film. There was a scene where every surviving character pulled out their phones and called their loved ones, and we got a small slice of their lives from each one. That’s one of my favorite scenes of all time, in any movie in general.
The movie itself was also filmed in the most intense way possible. There was not a single moment where you felt like you could just sit down and release a breath or anything. First there’s one problem for our hapless characters, then another, and more and more follow until you aren’t even sure whether they’ll make it or not.
Emergency Declaration was a great Korean movie with a large focus on family bonds that I felt was a refreshing change from everything else I’d seen so far.
