With the recent passing of Kim Jong Il, I wanted to watch something about Korea. My Netflix browsing turned up this film:
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| The description becomes relevant later |
At first, I thought the film was taking a risk. The idea that anyone would make a film about a North Korean commando raid was astounding. I wondered if any director, especially a South Korean one, could create characters and story with a topic like this. I watched the film to discover I was misinformed.
The actual plot of Silmido opens with a North Korean unit entering South Korea while attempting to kill the president. Cut within the war violence near the DMZ was a sequence of a murder which took place in South Korea by a group of gangsters. Both the gang and North Korean unit had one captured member (In-Chan and Kim Shin-Jo), and each received a death sentence from the court. As each awaits trial (unaware of the other's existence), the gang member is offered a way out of his death sentence by joining the Republic of Korea's military's special unit.
Much like The Dirty Dozen, the film focuses on a unit of convicted criminals tasked with an impossible mission. In the case of Unit 684, they are asked to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. The film progresses with the recruits being whipped into fighting shape by a ruthless commander. As the recruits push their way through basic training, they predictably bond with their trainers and win the respect of their officers. However, a difference between The Dirty Dozen and Silmido was the brutality visited upon the recruits in the latter film. After one sequence where two recruits escape and rape a civilian woman, the entire unit was forced to endure a beating at the hand of their trainers while one of the rapists watched. The beating ceased when a member of the 684 charged forward and beat the rapist to death.
Silmido varied from The Dirty Dozen by preventing the 684 from beginning their mission. During an interesting tease, the 684 set off for North Korea during the middle of a rainstorm. An order to abort came from the government, and the training soldiers stopped the now-fanatical 684 from continuing. As North/South relations thawed, the existence of 684 became an embarrassment. High government officials decided the unit needed to be eliminated by their trainers. If the trainers failed to kill the soldiers, the South Korean government would send military units to kill both the 684 and all the soldiers.
The film caused some controversy in Korea because of its dramatization of the 684 and the discussion of how South Korea operated during the years of Park Chung-hee. (Normally, I would say SPOILER WARNING, but the 684 was a real unit, so the ending is a matter of record). Most records about the 684 sprang from the investigations of Baek Dong-Ho, a safecracker who encountered a Silmido survivor known as K. Baek dilligently traced the rumors to tell the story which became the novel and screenplay. The ending of the film had every member of the 684 dying in a Wild Bunch-style gun battle. However, the tracing of the story began with Baek hearing rumors from K, meaning there was at least one survivor.
Baek's tour of rumor and the subsequent film explored the darker side of Park's regime. Although it seems impossible now, South Korea was once, in essence, a dictatorship. Park was "our guy," but he ruled South Korea with little respect for human rights or individual freedom. Silmido's senseless waste of human life and brutality served as a metaphor for the South Korean government's inhumanity during the sixties and seventies. The casual cruelty of intelligence and government officials struck the noble and mission-focused soldiers as abhorrent. When each solider was forced to kill the recruit he supervised, each solider fell into the position faced by most military men under dictatorships.
The 1951 film The Desert Fox portrayed Erwin Rommel (James Mason), the WWII German field commander, facing a similar situation during the depiction of El Alamein. Rommel wanted to fall back and take a new position, but the orders from Berlin stated Rommel was to remain with the slogan, "Victory or death." Rommel carried out the order because it came directly from Hitler, but the film's progression followed Rommel as his doubts about Hitler grew. Rommel attempted to maintain himself in the war but saw the chance for survival and peace diminishing. His choice to oppose Hitler and involve himself with the conspirators who eventually carried out the July 20 plot (which was briefly but extremely inaccurately depicted in the film).
Some critics of The Desert Fox panned the film for its sympathetic portrayal of a Nazi. A New York Times review of the film said, [The] anxiety to make a rousing picture has overridden moral judgement and good taste." The film was in terrible taste, but not for its depiction of Rommel. Much of the film relied on stock footage, some lifted from other films, to add excitement. I assumed someone used stock footage to prevent staging an expensive battle sequence, but the effect of unrelated footage shot in a different style was jarring rather than engaging. With one exception of a solider falling dead on a beach, the stock footage showed bombs falling and guns firing without showing the aftermath. The raid in the opening sequence (a British attempt on Rommel) had people dying of gunshot wounds in the classic grab-my-chest-grimance-and-fall-dead manner. Music during the landing included US martial themes like "The Marine Hymn," "The Air Force Song," and "Anchors Aweigh," with little reference to German music of the time. The film appeared to make Rommel, a committed solider to the German cause for most of his life, seem noble in the eyes of the American audience of the time. The film ends with none other than Winston Churchill's words of praise for Rommel.
The Desert Fox, like Silmido, was based on a biography written by an observer who tracked down "the real story." Desmond Young, a former British POW in Africa who briefly encountered Rommel, wrote a story attempting to explain the truth of Rommel's life and death. Young's book was rather complementary toward Rommel's myth, and the book betrayed Rommel as a humble man who treated others with respect and dignity. An early sequence in the film depicts Rommel as taking a personal interest in the habits of his staff and cordial disagreements with other officers. Newer accounts than Young's paint Rommel as a difficult and vain man who loved the spotlight. Both film versions were changed to make the story more palatable to audiences, with a bitter end for Silmido and a glorious retelling for Rommel. Each film "took liberties" with history to create better film for its time. The best part of each film was the forced questioning of popular perceptions of war and its perpetrators.
Rommel is still admired in certain circles. The Netflix description (along with other sites) of Simido never moved past the North Korean intrusion. Netflix inverted the roles in the description, thus misrepresenting the entire film. Imagine if someone read the description for Patton and then watched The Desert Fox. Several comments under the film showed the problem, but I assumed Netflix had little interest in correcting it. I watched the film believing that I would see a film treating a North Korean unit with dignity and respect.
The last line may seem stunning to some readers, but take a look at films like Letters From Iwo Jima or Downfall. Both took decades and distance to make, for both examined the war from the perspective of the "bad guys." Film, as a medium, matured after the Vietnam War, which made The Desert Fox perhaps ahead of its time. Silmido's success in South Korea came because it roused discussions about past atrocities. It may take years to get a film discussing Iraq or Afghanistan from the perspective of the locals. Time allows for deeper introspection, but it can also cause us to forget.
Other Films Watched This Week:
Thor, 2011
Four Lions, 2010
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