“Can’t people just be humane, peace-loving citizens?,” Min-sung (Park Seo-joon) asks at the beginning of “Concrete Utopia,” wondering aloud why the hundreds of apocalypse survivors using his apartment building as makeshift shelter can’t simply share resources and work together.
It’s a lovely sentiment, but writer/director Tae-hwa Eom appears to take his protagonist’s rhetorical question as a personal attack. From there on out, he devotes every subsequent frame of his film to explaining why humans are apparently incapable of doing anything good for each other. In the film’s view, only one human institution is strong enough to stand steadfast when our innate barbarism rears its ugly head: the condo board.
“Concrete Utopia” opens with a brutal earthquake that reduces Seoul to rubble and instantly forces its surviving population to revert to a hunter-gatherer society. The film wisely wastes zero time explaining why the disaster took place,...
It’s a lovely sentiment, but writer/director Tae-hwa Eom appears to take his protagonist’s rhetorical question as a personal attack. From there on out, he devotes every subsequent frame of his film to explaining why humans are apparently incapable of doing anything good for each other. In the film’s view, only one human institution is strong enough to stand steadfast when our innate barbarism rears its ugly head: the condo board.
“Concrete Utopia” opens with a brutal earthquake that reduces Seoul to rubble and instantly forces its surviving population to revert to a hunter-gatherer society. The film wisely wastes zero time explaining why the disaster took place,...
- 12/8/2023
- by Christian Zilko
- Indiewire
by Cláudio Alves
Genre cinema has long been the home of social critique through allegory. Think back to Godzilla's reflection on Japan's atomic trauma or Night of the Living Dead's invention of the zombie movie as the place to study civilization's collapse. South Korea's new Oscar submission, Concrete Utopia, follows the tradition. Though, here, you'll find no Romero undead or radioactive kaiju to distract and reflect human folly at the viewer. Instead, Tae-hwa Eom's latest tackles the precepts of the disaster flick with a dash of post-apocalyptic dystopia, showing Humanity's self-made ruin in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that renders Seoul a wasteland…...
Genre cinema has long been the home of social critique through allegory. Think back to Godzilla's reflection on Japan's atomic trauma or Night of the Living Dead's invention of the zombie movie as the place to study civilization's collapse. South Korea's new Oscar submission, Concrete Utopia, follows the tradition. Though, here, you'll find no Romero undead or radioactive kaiju to distract and reflect human folly at the viewer. Instead, Tae-hwa Eom's latest tackles the precepts of the disaster flick with a dash of post-apocalyptic dystopia, showing Humanity's self-made ruin in the aftermath of a massive earthquake that renders Seoul a wasteland…...
- 9/11/2023
- by Cláudio Alves
- FilmExperience
Korea has selected the disaster thriller Concrete Utopia starring Lee Byung-hun and Park Seo-jun as its entry for the Best International Feature Film category at the 2024 Oscars.
Directed by Tae-hwa Eom, the pic follows a group of survivors who struggle for a new life in Seoul following a massive earthquake. The pic opened in Korea on August 9 and was the number-one movie at the Korean box office last weekend. The pic has grossed $16.8M through today. Concrete Utopia is also set to screen at the Toronto Film Festival, where stars Byung-hun and Seo-jun will hold an in-person Q&a.
The Korean Film Council announced its choice today, saying Concrete Utopia was “selected unanimously by seven judges, considering that it would be able to appeal to North America without being unfamiliar with the trend of K-culture and K-movie.”
The council added: “We tried to select a film that is Korean yet aims for a global standard,...
Directed by Tae-hwa Eom, the pic follows a group of survivors who struggle for a new life in Seoul following a massive earthquake. The pic opened in Korea on August 9 and was the number-one movie at the Korean box office last weekend. The pic has grossed $16.8M through today. Concrete Utopia is also set to screen at the Toronto Film Festival, where stars Byung-hun and Seo-jun will hold an in-person Q&a.
The Korean Film Council announced its choice today, saying Concrete Utopia was “selected unanimously by seven judges, considering that it would be able to appeal to North America without being unfamiliar with the trend of K-culture and K-movie.”
The council added: “We tried to select a film that is Korean yet aims for a global standard,...
- 8/17/2023
- by Zac Ntim
- Deadline Film + TV
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