Film: 71 - Into The Fire
Release date: 14th March 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 116 mins
Director: John H. Lee
Starring: Cha Seung-won, Kwone Sang-woo, Choi Seung-hyun, Kim Seung-woo
Genre: Drama/War
Studio: Cine Asia
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: South Korea
An expensive, ambitious production chronicling the heroism and sacrifice of a reluctant group of student soldiers who fought one of the most important battles in the early goings of the Korean War.
They have only fired a single shot in training, but 71 student soldiers in the South Korean army are left behind to face the elite 766 Commando Brigade of their North Korean enemies. Under the leadership of Oh Jang-beom (Choi), this band of hapless and frightened young men suddenly find themselves on the front line of one of the crucial battles in a raging war.
As Oh’s leadership grows and faces tests from inside, the North Koreans get closer and closer. Soon, violence will explode, and not all of the 71 can hope to escape alive. But in a war destined to endure long after their souls have departed, how long can Oh’s ragtag band of young warriors hold off their enemies?
By now, the average film-viewer is used to seeing cinematic war from deep inside the trenches and right amongst the battle. But rarely has a war film featured violence and chaos as immediate and relentless as 71 - Into The Fire. It throws the viewer right into the thick of things, following the fortunes of characters whose names the filmmakers trust their audience to catch and remember. In not stopping to carve out personalities in the opening minutes, director Lee creates an effective cinematic reflection of the chaos and fundamental madness of war. That the viewer is plunged into a battle already taking place is disorientating enough, and a pretty standard film technique for this genre. As the action and exposition progresses across the first act at a deliberate pace, with older military men already at each other’s throats over strategic differences in a campaign that seems to have been doomed long before the opening credits, it renders the characters mostly elusive - the nameless and faceless destined to merge together beneath a statistic in history. It makes for unsettling and occasionally uncomfortable cinema for the distanced viewer, but is arguably far more potent for it.
The crew do exemplary work, both with the practical and prosthetic effects, as well as the digital. Bullets whiz by characters’ heads, zipping past the frame, while hideous dark blood sprays and spurts from new bullet wounds in all its saturated gore. Scenes of the inexperienced South Korean student soldiers dragging a variety of dead bodies into mass graves is convincing to the point of stomach-turning, as arms come loose and maggots writhe in bloody wounds. It would take a viewer of unfathomable impressionability to sign up to any army after watching this film.
The effects crew is matched shot-for-shot by the stunt team. In the opening ten minutes, the viewer watches agog as a stationary jeep is lifted twenty-feet off the ground by a bomb blast, soaring over the prone body of a soldier. It is the kind of stunning image, imaginative in its conception and breathtaking in its execution, that stays with the viewer throughout and after the film. Elsewhere, stuntmen tumble lifeless from buildings and absorb debris in explosions. In every department, Lee achieves a brutal, unromantic realism.
But the very nature of cinema brings a certain kinesis to proceedings and, as can sometimes happen with a war movie, or any film depicting real-life disasters and human suffering, there is the question of should it be as exciting, heart-pounding as it is? Is it disrespectful to thrill and entertain when depicting an important moment in history, a drive for freedom in which many lives were sacrificed? Director Lee admirably dances around this issue, by giving the audience thrills not with stylised or comic book-style violence, but with the heroism of the characters. The tragedy of war pounds the viewer into an exhausted state, but the courage and valour of the young men whose tale it tells makes 71 - Into The Fire an exhilarating ode to the human spirit.
Technically, the film is superb. The saturated colour palette again perfectly evokes the feeling of hopelessness and despair of war, while the cinematography is a seamless, fluid mix of a pseudo-documentary style and a more unobtrusive, subdued style in the dramatic and dialogue scenes. But no war film, however engrossing, can get by on action and visuals alone. What elevates 71 - Into The Fire above the general standard of the genre is the heart afforded to the script, and Lee’s way with teasing a pure, base form of dread from his audience. The aforementioned burial scene is stark and uncompromising in showing the human cost of war - not just the physical price paid by the dead, but the mental and emotional damage incurred by those who have to bury them. In less experienced hands, the spontaneous vomiting of the soldiers could have played like riotous - or even unintentional - black comedy, in Lee’s, the scene is heart-rending, and stokes the fires of fear in the viewer that not everyone in the group is cut out for the carnage and horror that is about to unfold. This sense of dread pervades the entire film - a scene with three ‘student’ soldiers play-acting with a grenade is unbearably tense, while the heightened antics of the North Korean forces (who swim across a river at the command of their single-minded general) render them almost otherworldly villains - the near-mythological bogeymen of history, marching relentlessly upon the plucky, overmatched South Korean underdogs.
And then there are the performances. Choi Seung-hyeon is an engaging lead as Oh Jang-beom, the reluctant commander of the student forces, whose sense of duty and patriotism is tested by his lack of faith in his own abilities. Pleasingly, upon being appointed, Jang-beom is neither whiny nor loud in his reluctance, but rather understated - his quiet conviction that he is not right for the role does as much to convince the viewer of impending doom as the looming North Korean army. But as his character rises to the occasion, Choi pulls the audience with him every step of the way - steady without being intense, and compelling without once showing off. Stealing the show is Cha Seung-won as Park, the North Korean general, who benefits from the more obviously stylised manner in which the early scenes of the North Korean advance are shot, edited and scored, filling the bigger frame with an effective evil charisma.
Of course, despite the film’s many strengths, there is the odd niggle. Lee is not averse to the odd cliché. A sequence showing fleeing soldiers crosscut with a flashback to their triumphant, hopeful setting off for the war, accompanied by a swelling orchestra, is pure war-film-by-numbers. Elsewhere, the suffering of the South Korean people is displayed in slightly gratuitous slow-motion, every effort made to wring out the last drops of emotions, and paint clear black-and-white baddies and goodies. But in a film of this quality and integrity, such flaws are forgivable as concessions for audience accessibility.
Come the conclusion, the viewer is left exhausted and spent. At two hours, the film is perhaps a little overlong - but that may be exactly the point. After all, does not every war outstay its welcome?
Technically on a par with any war film in recent memory, and with genuine heart and emotion, 71 - Into The Fire is a marvellous tribute to a brave band of reluctant warriors. JN
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