Doomsday Book Blu-ray Review
Three for the price of one.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 9, 2012
Are there Mayans in South Korea? Have they infiltrated that country's burgeoning film industry? With many
apocalyptically obsessed people fretting about the upcoming milestone of December 21, 2012, supposedly the day
everything comes crashing to some kind of calamitous close,
Doomsday Book, a science fiction trilogy positing
different scenarios involving the end of
some world (more or less), one might as well assume a Mayan influence
as much as anything else. Of course, the fact that at least some of the stories in this trilogy are futuristic in spirit if not
in overt setting, there may be hope for us after all—at least for a little while. All three of the short films included in this
portmanteau have rather cheeky senses of humor, and they all indicate that the obsessive tendencies that
have led some people to worry about why Mayans ended their calendar when they did aren't going away any time
soon. (There was a great cartoon I saw this year that had the Mayans carving their calendars out of rock and one of
them said, "Oh, we're out of stone—let's just stop here". That probably makes as much sense as anything else.) The
film had its own kind of precarious bout with existence, initially being planned as a three parter featuring three different
directors, but then encountering financing difficulties that put the film in limbo for quite some time. When funding was
finally established, the original plan was shelved and the two directors who had already completed their segments
worked together to create a third (though only director Yim Pil-sung received official credit on the third piece). The three
different segments really have no real through line and even their relation to a supposed apocalyptic theme is
somewhat tangential, but they do make for an often funny and even thought provoking triptych.
The three segments in
Doomsday Book are:
Brave New World. Those of you who have worried about your kids seeing news reports of
e coli and
other contaminants entering the food stream and devastating (sometimes actually
taking) lives may well have a
visceral reaction to
Brave New World, a sort of proto-zombie enterprise that uses tainted food as its subtext.
Geeky kid Yoon (Ryu Seung-bum) isn't especially pleased when his parents and sister announce they're leaving on
vacation without taking him along, since they assume his military duties (which are actually in a scientific wing) wouldn't
allow him to leave. Instead Yoon's mother leaves him with a large "honey do" list to take care of while they're gone. It
turns out the family seems to be precariously close to hoarding territory, and poor Yoon is left to sort through piles of
garbage and some disgustingly moldy food. He manages to get some especially horrid looking food scraps out to a
recycling bin surrounded by feral cats, dumping the stuff in and running away. We then are privy to a sort of molecular
view of
something nasty going on with a diseased apple which, in the following montage sequence, enters the
food chain in some feed given to livestock, cattle which is then slaughtered and, irony of ironies, ends up on a plate at a
barbecue joint where Yoon has talked a comely young lass named Kim (Go Joon-hee) into accompanying him. Yoon and
Kim, along with several others eating the infected meat at the restaurant, then begin morphing into flesh eating
zombies.
This segment has an almost surreal quality to it once the zombiefication starts taking hold of the general populace. We
get a really frenetic, kind of drug fueled sequence with Yoon at a discotheque where he freaks out and, later, there is a
truly bizarre sequence that is like something out of Luis Buñuel film where a news show reporting on the "virus"
devolves into one woman screaming Russian while another man plays an ethnic flute. There's a passing reference to
Adam and Eve and Genesis in the closing moments of this peculiar little piece that may not make a whole lot of sense,
but which adds to the sort of religiosity that is of course at the core of most apocalyptic thinking.
Heavenly Creature. No, this is
not some sort of singular reboot of Peter Jackson's
Heavenly Creatures, but is in a
very real a rather thought provoking companion piece to Alex Proyas' film version of Philip K. Dick's
I, Robot. A young, somewhat impetuous
computer repairman named Park (Kim Kang-woo) is called out to look at a robot (looking
very similar to the one
in
I, Robot) which is an attendant of sorts at a Buddhist monastery. The problem is that the robot has
developed its own innate spirituality and has in fact achieved enlightenment. Neither the computer repairman nor
higher ups in the computer firm know quite what to make of this startling development, but they are quite obviously
threatened by it.
This is probably the best, or at the least the most thoughtful, segment of the three in
Doomsday Book, though it
tends to get a little hyperbolic at times, with various proponents and antagonists screaming at each other about the
idea of whether or not the robot could have this level of intelligence. As with anything revolving around philosophy and
religion, this is an awfully talky enterprise, especially toward its endgame, when the needlessly villainous head of the
computer company shows up to "terminate" the enlightened Buddha robot. But there is something very interesting
about
Heavenly Creature as it explores the dialectic between humans depending on technology and humans
being dominated or even threatened by that selfsame technology. There is a rather peculiar little twist at the very end
of this segment that I'm not quite sure is trying to say, other than that the tethers between men and technology are
tighter and more interwoven than probably any of us care to admit.
Happy Birthday is a decidedly whimsical entry, and one that contrasts with the worry some parents may have
when watching
Brave New World, as this piece revolves around a child who is worried about how her
parents will react when they find out she's destroyed her father's prized 8 ball in the billiards set to which he is
seemingly addicted. The young girl, named Min-seo (played for the bulk of this segment by Jin Ji-hee), sneaks into her
uncle's room and finds a website to order a replacement, which turns out to be run by aliens who send a meteor sized
8 ball hurtling toward Earth. The segment segues forward two years after the order is placed, to the time when the 8
ball is threatening the planet within just a few hours and Min-seo's family is moving into a bomb shelter they've built.
This is a frankly sort of weird little piece, but it has some laugh out loud moments, especially when it focuses on both
some news reporters as well as a sort of QVC Home Shopping Network that is hawking "survival pods" that hilariously
malfunction during the sales pitch. By contrast, one of the news anchors goes completely berserk on air, revealing her
co-anchor, a married man, has dumped her for a younger reporter at the station. This sort of silliness doesn't play
particularly well into the apocalyptic motif
Doomsday Book wants to exploit, but it makes for some extremely
amusing interplay between the characters. The denouement of this segment isn't particularly satisfying, though it does
include some great looking VFX.
