Haeundae

In a commercial sense, one movie towered above all the rest in 2009: Haeundae. The story of a tidal wave that visits destruction upon Korea’s most famous beach, Youn Je-gyun’s disaster pic became the first film since The Host (2006) to break through the 10 million admissions barrier at the box office. With a final tally of 11.4 million admissions, it currently ranks as the fifth best grossing film in Korean box office history, behind Avatar (13.3m), The Host (13m), King and the Clown (12.3m), and Tae Guk Gi (11.7m). It has turned its director into a major power broker in the industry, and its success produced oceans of commentary about Korean audiences’ tastes and the current state of the Korean film industry.
Just about all of the film is, indeed, set in the beachside district of Haeundae in Korea’s second-largest city Busan (this area also happens to be the focal point of the Pusan International Film Festival). It is a particularly crowded place in the summer, to the point that you can hardly see any sand on the beach due to all the sunbathers. Here we are introduced to the film’s characters. Man-sik (Sul Kyung-gu, Silmido) is a seaman who has sunk into despair and drinking after his error led to the death of an elder seaman in 2004. What’s more, Man-shik has long been in love with the deceased seaman’s daughter Yeon-hee (Ha Ji-won, Sex Is Zero), who operates a raw fish restaurant, but guilt prevents him from opening his heart to her. Meanwhile, the tsunami expert Kim Hwi (Park Joong-hoon, Nowhere To Hide) discovers worrying signs of activity on the ocean floor between Korea and Japan, that bear a resemblance to what happened in the Indian Ocean during the 2004 tsunami. He tries to sound a warning, but the complacent staff at the Disaster Prevention Agency insist that Korea is in no danger. Meanwhile he runs into his estranged ex-wife Yoo-jin (Uhm Jung-hwa, Marriage Is A Crazy Thing), who has a little girl in tow. Kim will soon find out that little girl is his. There are other plot lines as well, involving a woman from Seoul named Hee-mi who falls in love with a man who works in the Coast Guard, and the older but slightly infantile Dong-chun who has trouble relating to his mother.
With a super-tsunami ready to hit the city in the film’s final reel, there is much potential for drama and melodrama of all sorts to take place. But Haeundae also contains a surprising amount of humor, considering its genre. Director Youn is known for this; in past works like My Boss, My Hero (2001) and Sex Is Zero (2002) he has demonstrated his talent for off-the-wall comedy, and despite this film’s big budget he is not afraid to insert the occasional bits of slapstick. As a result the film does feel uneven, but in a way that makes it more rather than less entertaining. It is certainly quite unlike Hollywood-style disaster movies.
On a technical level this film is quite ably put together. California-based Polygon Entertainment, which handled the visuals for The Perfect Storm and The Day After Tomorrow, was responsible for most of the water effects. The Korean company Mofac Studio also worked on a large number of shots, and ended up doing final enhancement of almost all the effects done by Polygon. For the Korean audience, the tsunami scenes represented the first time to see familiar local landmarks destroyed with such verisimilitude on screen. But even for foreign viewers who have never been to Korea, the last reel should provide plenty of spectacle.