#Alive is a Perfect Companion Piece for Lockdown
What’s up, Horror Bound loyal, I am back with not only another Netflix original, but another Netflix original out of Korea. South Korea’s been kind of knocking them out of the park lately with quite the string of genre franchises, what with Train to Busan (2016), the animated prequel Seoul Station (2016), the Steven Yeun thriller Burning (2018), and of course, another Netflix original, Kingdom (2019). I did a pretty in-depth review of the entire first season of that last one there, which you can always read here . There is a reason why I did not review the second season, but that’s neither here nor there. Nope, today we’re talking about the latest horror feature coming out of South Korea and generating a bit of buzz, writer/director Il Cho’s zombie actioner, #Alive. Not to be confused with the 1993 film about the Uruguayan rugby team turned cannibals or the brilliant action horror piece by another amazing Asian filmmaker, Ryuhei Kitamura. And yes, I’m glad you remembered, I did write about Kitamura-san in parts one and three of my primer on Asian Horror here at Horror Bound as well… and yes, you can read those here and here . So yeah, the unique identifier here is that clever hash tag in front of the title word in Cho’s work (more on the use of that clever little symbol later). Let’s dive in!
Chances are you may have already seen the opening minutes of this feature length directorial debut from Cho as it made the rounds during the initial marketing campaign for Netflix. And yes, it starts off with quite the run out of the gate. Our main character, Oh Joon-woo, wakes up late one morning to an already empty house, literally rolls over and starts gaming online with some of his buddies. All of the sudden, one of the gamers tells the gathered group to turn on the TV. This is when Joon-woo finds out that the entire city has been suddenly overcome by a strange virus that turns its victims into flesh-eating monsters. And that’s it, we’re off and running.
Similar to some of my other favorite zombie properties like 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead (the comic book), you don’t really get a reason behind the zombie infestation except that it’s some kind of virus and it’s possibly mutated, etc., etc. Personally, I’ve always felt that in short form storytelling like film, you can’t really spend a lot of time on first, finding what caused the problem, then, taking the time to find a way of fixing it. This always works better when you have more time, say in a series like Kingdom or Z Nation. Because this is the Internet and someone will challenge it, I understand that technically yes, we do know in The Walking Dead that the entire race already has the cause inside them; we’re never really told how they all have it. And in 28 Days Later, we know the infected have “The Rage” and we know that monkeys with this Rage were being experimented on, however we never really know how The Rage started.
Which brings me to another one of my favorite aspects of #Alive, which I know I’m part of the minority on: running zombies. Look, we can go on and on (and I have before on this site) about Team Running Zombies versus Team Trudging Zombies, of which I’m a proud member of the former, but for whatever reason, Korea loves the running zombies. We saw it in Train to Busan, then again in Kingdom and we see it again here in #Alive. Unlike those two, here it seems that the undead maintain a relatively lumbering speed unless spurred into a sprint by something (read: food).
But let’s talk characters, characterization and character development; after all, that’s what really makes a good film. Although we spend a lot of act one and the first part of act two, focused in on our main character, Oh, and his struggle with surviving. It isn’t until the introduction of hardened survivalist, Kim Yoo-bin, who lives in the building across the street, that we really get to see the previously doomed Oh start to arc as a character. Don’t get me wrong, both these teens were probably pretty helpless pre-outbreak, but we start to see the contrast between the two soon after they meet.
Twenty days into the pandemic, Oh was hanging on with what he had in the apartment, wasn’t venturing out for supplies, and even eats what he labels his “last meal” after seeing a commercial on TV that makes him cave to temptation. Once he runs out of water, he raids his dad’s liquor cabinet, which we, the viewer, know is a big no-no when you’re trying to hydrate. In fact, when the resourceful Kim finally reaches out to Oh, he’s hanging from a light fixture in an attempt to kill himself, having lost all hope. It’s soon after this encounter that we get a glimpse into just how prepared Kim has become, not because she’s a die-hard survivalist or anything, but because she has become a product of her situation. Her apartment is booby-trapped; she has plenty of the essentials like water, food, binoculars, etc.
Thanks to her or some might say, because of her, Oh is reinvigorated. He ventures out on supply runs throughout the building, in the middle of the night no less, he’s emboldened even. He sees the need in items like batteries, walkie-talkies, camping supplies, where he was just waiting to die before. In the end, it takes both their talents to get rescued and I think that’s the overarching message the creators want to deliver here.
Make no mistake, at the start of the film, Oh, is a slacker teenager addicted to gaming and social media, which is actually a huge and very real problem in South Korea and has been for years. They call it an epidemic over there and the stories of kids dying from having stayed up too long with no food or drink to complete a marathon gaming session are not rare. There’s also an overwhelming growth in teen depression and just a plain lack of wanting to be normal functioning members of society. So I have to think that there’s some commentary going on here, but with a happy ending: We see the incompetent Oh slowly turn into a very functioning adult when he sees the growth is necessary for his own survival and that of another human being.
So there’s hope there too. But the messages can seem mixed at times. Although it’s technology and his post to social media that inevitably saves them both, one of the possibilities earlier on in the film in which he can achieve a more archaic form of communication via a cell phone app that uses FM bandwidth, he can’t take advantage of it because it also requires the use of an 1/8” headphone adapter to which, of course, he only owns ten different kinds of Bluetooth and other wireless headphones.
There are some other plot hole issues that irked me a bit, like why do they continue to broadcast live news on the TV long after the water supply to the apartment buildings run out. Like, what are your priorities here, people! Also, on day 20, a military force starts carpet-bombing a city area across the bay from Oh’s section of town, yet we can see plenty of cars driving on a bridge in the foreground as if everything in the world is fine, there’s not even any traffic on that bridge. There’s a few other instances where it seems like there are signs the world is going on as usual, yet Oh’s block is a ghost town (except for the zombies, of course) and has been since like day five. We’re never told why Kim always wants to meet to talk with Oh at seven o’clock in the morning or why the top floor on Oh’s building is the only one that seems to be free of infestation. But I always say that when you’re dealing with subject matter such as this, you kind of have to suspend disbelief going in. I mean, it’s not like zombie infestations happen every day to begin with, so go crazy with it, right?
From a filmmaking standpoint, there’s a ton of great camera work going on in here, due to director Il Cho’s previous experience coming predominantly from stints as Second Unit Director and Assistant Director on a handful of other films prior to this one. Nothing fancy really, just a good use of moving the camera around and capturing some really tense moments in some really tight spaces. There’s not a ton of visual effects, but the makeup effects and gore are pretty solid throughout. I always have a ton of respect for any crew that has to doll up an extras cast of tens of hundreds of people in any type of makeup that has any kind of depth to it, you know. Kudos to them.
I definitely enjoyed #Alive much more the second time around in preparing for this review. Sure it has it’s problems with believability in some parts and its messaging gets a little confusing throughout. But, there’s some great storytelling in there and a load of characterization and character arc to really please any fan of the genre or of film in general. If you’re still sheltering in place and want to make a day of it, I would totally recommend making a whole Korean affair out of it and pairing this one with both Kingdom and Train to Busan.
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