Clever Turtles

My friend once had to chance to ask the great Korean director Park Chan-wook a question when he was promoting "박쥐" ("Thirst") here in Honolulu. "Why," he asked, "aren't there decent Korean science-fiction movies?"

This SF/Fantasy/Action film does not provide a counter-example. I would have to say this movies takes Korean SF to a new low. The plot is absolutely incomprehensible -- the only reason I have the slightest clue what was happening was because of the synopsis printed on the Netflix sleeve. To crib from Statler and Waldorf, it's best point is the relatively short running time of 80 minutes.

Halfway through the movie it occurred to me that it was essentially a bad copy of the storyline in the Squaresoft RPG "Chrono Trigger". The movie starts off with a police officer in a running gun battle with some sort of criminal/terrorist/ninja, with a tattoo on her forehead. This is important, because . . . okay, I don't know why its important. Because the woman with the tattoo comes up later as a good guy, but she doesn't seem to accomplish anything then, either.

The cop is later assigned to help a scientist on an important national science project. He is uniquely psychically harmonized to use the project's time machine to go into the past -- or maybe the future.

[I could never figure out which. They had swords and castles and laser beams and it was all really, really confusing.]

The scientist's daughter was testing the machine and somehow got sucked into a time warp, and needed to be rescued. Hence, the need for a time-traveling cop.

So he uses the time machine to have a sort of deja-vu with his alter-ego in the past/future, who is a warrior secretly in love with the princess, who is the alter-ego of the scientist's daughter. But she is engaged to a general, who is the alter-ego of a time-traveling terrorist, or something. So he goes on a mission to save the kingdom from an invading horde, led by an evil sorceror, or something like that. With his companions, who are, in the present time, the tattooed terrorist and his cop buddy, and a bunch of other people, who were selected in a sort of Thunderdome style tournament. They all have names and unique costumes and fighting styles, but almost no dialog or actual impact on the plot.

Then there was lots of fighting, which was confusing, and some more time-traveling, which was even more confusing.

As an action movie, it was OK. Fight scenes were decent but not spectacular, and special effects were minimal and fairly low-budget. The photography seemed really horrible -- I wasn't sure if it was just filmed very low-budget or if it was my copy, which seemed more like a Chinese bootleg than an actual release. Lighting, colors, even the basic resolution was horrible.

Overall, this is one of the worst examples of Korean SF/Fantasy that I've run across. I will recommend it to my friends, however; our anime club runs a Bad Movie Night, and "Dream of a Warrior" would be an excellent follow up to "Ator, the Invincible".

CORPORATE WHORE LINKS:
Dream of a Warrior

Ator the Fighting Eagle

"Ator" seems to be sold out and out of print, making "Dream of a Warrior" an excellently awful substitute.