So, it’s been a while… I’m not very good at keeping this blog alive. I will also not make any promises this time to say that I will try to keep the posts coming in. But I do miss watching movies and writing and I thought I should start back on my hobby in 2020.

The first movie I decided to watch out of all the movies that came out on Thursday in Singapore is Ashfall or the Korean name is 백두산, which is literally translated as Baekdu Mountain. It still exists today and is actually an active volcano sitting at the border of China and North Korea. Last eruption was in 1903. With climate change, who knows when it will erupt but that’s where the movie comes in…

The movie, which has a star-studded casts of Lee Byung-hun, Ha Jung-woo, Ma Dong-seok, Jeon Hye-jin and Bae Suzy, imagines a catastrophic eruption from Baekdu Mountain that could potentially destroy 48% of the Korean peninsula. After a destructive earthquake of 8.0 magnitude, Jeon Yoo-kyung (Jeon Hye-jin) desperately approached Professor Kang Bong-rae (Ma Dong-seok) for a solution. Professor Kang Bong-rae had been studying the mountain and its eruptions and predicted the upcoming ones. He then presented a somewhat impossible solution – use a nuclear bomb and detonate it before the final and most destructive eruption comes about. This is where Captain Jo In-chang (Ha Jung-woo) came in with his team. His team’s task was to contact Lee Joon-pyeong (Lee Byung-hun), find out where in North Korea was the nuclear bomb held, steal it and send it to a special force who will then detonate it within the mountain. However, unfortunate events happened and his team was then forced into a situation none of them were ever trained for.

I am going to be honest – I did not have high expectation on the movie. The trailer looks like that 2012 movie, which is horrendous, in my opinion. But this movie is not that bad after all. It mixes all the elements that anyone will find entertaining – action, comedy, drama. All the explosions, the endless comical banters between Lee Joon-pyeong and Jo In-chang, the political drama, found family trope. But one thing is for sure, you would come out of the theatre not liking America one bit. At least I don’t. 99% of the time, I feel like screaming “not your country, not your business” but I guess that’s the emotion that the director may have wanted the audience to feel.

The casts, being experienced actors, did really well in the movie. The chemistry between Lee Byung-hun and Ha Jung-woo is just great to watch – they are super entertaining. The one-liners are hilarious and they keep using them throughout the movie. It just makes something that could turn into another typical disaster movie to a really good one and all I could say about it is… trust the Koreans to do a better job than Hollywood. I mean, they did it with Train To Busan. They did it again with Kingdom. And now they are doing it again with Ashfall. Koreans just did it better than Hollywood. Sorry Hollywood but you have a lot to learn from them.

All in all, enjoyable. I do recommend anyone to watch it. My parents enjoyed it. But maybe don’t bring kids – they would learn curse words, in both Korean and English. Ha!

I give this movie 4.8 out of 5 – 0.2 because what’s the likelihood of this to happen? Zero, maybe. Last time, Baekdu Mountain had a really huge eruption, there were no records of casualties. Yes, it was so long ago but the only known record was it sounded so loud that it terrified the emperor who then pardoned the prisoners and set them free. It did cause, however, a climatic effect, which caused famine. The Day After Tomorrow, in my opinion, still takes the cake of being the more realistic disaster movie.

Trailer…