Last year, this big-budget production was the whipping boy of the failed post-pandemic Korean box office, whose unexpectedly low numbers were initially blamed on a movie-going public still stuck on streaming. Actually, the crappy performance of The Moon, the flagship domestic release of the summer of 2023, had more to do with hubris and the inability of big studios to read its audience. Watching the movie a year removed from the debacle it’s easy to see why. It essentially has all the ingredients that stereotypically make a successful mainstream Korean movie—a plot built around retribution of some kind involving characters who are related by blood, suicide as an act of taking responsibility, self-flagellating nationalistic sentiments, scene upon scene of people weeping uncontrollably, forced comic relief, even the requisite car chase (on the lunar surface!)—and Korean movie lovers, obviously clued in on these attributes, decided they’d stay away. 

The plot and the set pieces are mostly lifted from other, better space travel movies, namely Hollywood productions like Gravity and Apollo 13. The back story, in fact, shows more potential: sometime in the future, South Korea’s small but determined space program attempts a moon launch and ends up killing its astronauts. Chastened but still determined, the program tries again five years later without the approval of NASA, which is portrayed here as a bullying global space overseer who doesn’t want competition. The movie begins in the middle, as two of the three astronauts happy-go-luckily repair the solar panels on their moon-bound spacecraft that have been damaged by solar flares. During the repair, the two men are killed, leaving their younger colleague, Hwang (Doh Kyung-soo), a former Navy SEAL who lacks much of the technical know-how to pilot the ship, on his own. While mission control tries to figure out how to bring him back to earth in the damaged craft, Hwang decides unilaterally to complete the mission and land on the moon’s far side. When Kim (Sul Kyung-gu), one of the designers of the previous, disastrous mission, is called in to help Hwang in his seemingly wrong-headed endeavor, we learn that Kim quit the program because his engineering partner—and Hwang’s father—killed himself in shame. From that point, the story lurches from one impossible feat to another in a spiral of alternately heroic and desperate moves on the part of various characters to keep both Hwang and the mission alive, and while director Kim Yong-hwa demonstrates more than the usual comepetence with the film’s action prerogatives he can’t assemble them into a credible whole. The production itself feels as desperate as the fictional moon shot, as if South Korea’s entire international image is riding on this movie. Moreover, the CGI is inferior to that which featured in the above-mentioned Hollywood films. 

The retribution that is often baked into these Korean blockbusters centers not only on Hwang righting the incompetence laid on his father, but also on Korea showing up its masters at NASA (where Kim’s ex-wife works under racist management that clearly views her participation as suspicious by default), and the combination of the two wears the drama down to a dull nub. There’s only so many tears one can shed for 130 minutes, and The Moon means to wring every last one out of you. Korean audiences, apparently, have had enough of that sort of thing. 

In Korean and English. Opens July 5 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

The Moon home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 CJ ENM Co., Ltd., CJ ENM Studios, Blaad Studios