Shiri, the 1999 South Korean action blockbuster changed Asian cinema forever. 20 years ago, when Shiri was released, it outperformed Titanic in South Korean cinemas. This was a big deal as Titanic grossed USD 4,599,796 in Korea. Shiri was an integral part of the success of the Korean cinema wave. Kang Je-Gyu, the director of Shiri, kept the content strictly Korean whilst utilizing Hollywood storytelling devices. This movie stimulated the universality of South Korean pop culture. The snowball effect that followed the release of this movie is why pop culture in South Korea is so omnipresent today.
The compelling and violent action blockbuster Shiri is an action-packed Korean movie created by director Kang Je-Gyu. Before one line is stated by an actor in the movie there is more violence and dead bodies than ever seen before in a Korean movie. The opening scene shows two people killing and slitting bodies, however, at the end of the day, the two people fighting are on the same side. This scene takes place in a North Korean training camp where the training is to kill and hurt your classmates. The winner and top student in this camp is Hee, who will be the main character as the movie progresses. The movie will continue and tell the story of Hee’s travels to South Korea, where she has to use her skills to kill scientists and politicians.
At the peak of action in the movie the North Koreans blow up a skyscraper, with a liquid explosive. In this explosion, the skyscraper is blown up and a field is destroyed. This scene is revolutionary because it was one of the first Korean movies to present above-average special effects.
Shiri stands for the code name of a plan that Hee’s advisors created; it refers to fish that live in the streams of the divided Korean Peninsula, which touches on the conflict between North and South Korea. As the plot rises in the movie the main conflict arises when two special agents from South Korea have to prevent the North from blowing up Seol, the capital of South Korea. Lee, a neurotic character who is obsessed with his job, and his partner Ryu, an intellectual, attempt to track down Lee and stop her from completing her mission.
Lee Bang-Hee, a promising trooper, was recruited by the Korean People’s Army in 1992. She was then trained by the Ground Force’s tip-top eighth Special Forces Unit. Lee Bang-Hee gets moved secretly to South Korea, where she assumes a key job by utilizing her special forces training to take out a few noticeable South Korean researchers and safeguard authorities and legislators all through the mid-1990s. Task Center, hot on her tail, researched a promising lead in 1996 preceding the trail went cold. OP gets a lead in 1998 when an arms dealer CI was killed by a mysterious sniper. South Korean law enforcement affirms that Bang-Hee has reemerged through orders from Pyongyang. Operation specialists Yu Jong-won and Lee Jang-gil explore the CI’s demise as their first significant case in years. Yet, as they proceed, the two operators get wind of a plot by a maverick North Korean command driven by Park Mu-young, a prepared North Korean officer in a similar unit Hee is in. He was involved in a terror scheme to murder North and South Korean government officials in a North/South Korean soccer game by utilizing a model fluid bomb called CTX.
The possibility of reunification is an exceptionally tricky subject in Korea, yet one that a large number of its residents feel very strongly about. As a result, there are a significant number of movies that address this issue. This is the case in Shiri. It is an action film including two South Korean secret agents attempting to find a gathering of highly trained North Korean aggressors and an undercover professional killer named Hee before they explode the whole city of Seoul. Besides this principle storyline, there is an additional storyline – a background romantic tale between Ryu, one of the mystery specialists, and Hyun, a seemingly innocent lady who runs a tropical fish shop. The shirt quickly became a box-office blockbuster. It became the most-watched film in South Korean history. There are many well-choreographed action scenes and intricate sub-plots. However, some portion of the purpose behind this movie’s immense achievement can be credited to the way that it centers around the present circumstance in Korea just as how that circumstance is influencing Korean national character. The diverse scenes of Shiri show that the director intends to utilize these scenes to bring about activity for the reunification of Korea. The idea of reunification is straightforwardly addressed in two early scenes in this film. The very first scene of the movie is when the leader of the rebel aggressors is addressing his warriors, wishing them good luck as they get ready to leave for South Korea to start to follow through on their plan.
The film gets its title from this quote, ‘Shiri, the code name of [this] complicated plot hatched by Hee’s colleagues, refers to a species of fish living in the streams that flow up and down the divided Korean peninsula.” By utilizing this type of fish, which is indigenous to Panmunjeon, Kang symbolizes his argument, contrasting the fish with the general population of North Korea, both of whom can’t get into South Korea. Even though this is vital, the essential piece of this scene is after this discourse when the majority of the troopers start to recite ‘For the Unification!’ The second scene is a texting discussion between Park, the leader of the aggressors now in South Korea, and Hee. In this scene, Park orders Hee to deal with the ‘kissingurami,’ which is a type of fish in which the male and female are constantly discovered together and die if they are separated; the importance of this request is uncovered later in the film. Immediately after this, they both type the phrase For the Unification!’ These scenes are especially imperative since they demonstrate that these aggressors see viciousness and violence as the best way to help these Korean individuals realize their longing for reunification. Through this scene, Kang is reasserting the general population of North Korea’s craving to reunify and to be free and industrialist like the South. In particular, he is communicating his conviction that it isn’t the general population that is the issue, but the administrations, who see no compelling reason to reunify. In such an excess of hidden significance, it might appear Kang has overlooked that there is likewise a motion picture going on. Not really. The scene closes with the heroes (South Korea) on top, albeit some would contend unexpectedly, and the presidents are spared from the bomb. Later, Ryu returns to Hyun’s fish store and listens to a phone message on his pager. The message is Hyun pronouncing that the time spent with him was the best time she spent in her entire life. This message truly reaffirms Kang’s contention that the two nations are one individual isolated by their legislatures. It additionally all around emphatically supports what he suggested before through Park’s discourse in the arena about the issue not being the general population, however, the administrations misleading their people with phony endeavors of reunification.
Throughout this storyline, the city becomes immersed in a tornado of dread and paranoia as innocent citizens are bombed. Agents Lee and Ryu pursue a foe who is constantly one scorched and darkened step in front of them. As Agent Lee is pulled in two ways by his delicate fiancée, Hyun, and the dead-eyed terrorist, Hee, the personal turns into the political.
Kang Je-gyu’s endeavors in this film have profoundly impacted South Korean culture. Many believe this film to be the beginning of the ongoing flood in South Korean film. It has additionally been followed by numerous different movies tending to the issue of reunification and national character in Korea, two of the most prominent being Joint Security Area (JSA) and Comrade. These films are gradually, but surely achieving change. While this change may not be between the two governments, it has helped to bring about change in the general public’s opinions and views of the exceptionally lamentable circumstances these two nations are encountering.
Starting here on, the film gets progressively more intense, as does the attention on reunification and its connection and impact on the creating national identity in South Korea. Amusingly, the first scene that legitimately displays this thought just happens to be the largest plot twist of the whole film. The plot twist is when Ryu finds that Hyun is Hee, but with plastic surgery to changes her appearance to look like Hyun. Through Hyun’s character, the director is obscuring the lines between friend and enemy. Through this, he is trying to depict this thought of a solitary national identity shared by both the North and South. In addition, Kang compares the misery and hopelessness of having to live the life of another person to live in a divided land where no simple arrangement of individual identity is allowed. At the climax of the movie, when Ryu finds out that Park has begun the reaction to the CTX explosive, Park and the other North Korean aggressors explain their yearning for the rejoining of the two countries, and some even express a trace of disgrace about the nations’ present detachment. They need to end the 50 years of misdirection by their administration that has forced their people to sell their children into slavery. The soccer game is understood to just be a demonstration – the leaders do not want reunification. Therefore, they decide that murdering both presidents will lead to the reunification of the two Koreas.
Before the release of Shiri, in the 1990s, South Koreans had very little regard for their own pop culture; as a result of the lack of South Korean cinema pride, nobody outside of South Korea knew about their movie culture. The release of this melodramatic action sparked a big change in South Korea. Jacky Kang Ge-yu’s Shiri not only broke box-office records at home but piqued foreign interest as well. Korean filmmakers and cultural leaders gained confidence in their abilities and their work once they saw the remarkable success of another foreign film. This newfound confidence of the directors allowed South Korean citizens to have pride in their domestic films and look forward to going to see their cinema.
As a result, other directors felt the ability to release their work without fear. This paved the way for movies such as Friend, The Host Joint Security Area, and so many others. The perfect equilibrium between strictly Korean content and the Hollywood-style structure helped shape the South Korean cinematography industry to be something that South Koreans could not only be proud of and enjoy, but also share with the rest of the world.
All in all this movie recreates and adopts modern-day Hollywood style, which at its time revolutionized Korean pop culture and cinema. Also while Kang Je-Gru used cinematic tools from Hollywood he still kept the content strictly Korean and emphasized an Asian narrative. This was important because it allowed Asians to view Hollywood-type movies, boxing action-packed movies, and be able to watch them in their home language. This was important because before this movie to view a movie that was created like “Shiri” one would have to read subtitles or it was dubbed into their common language which took away part of the movie’s character. Kang Je-Gru was able to make his movie seem like an american Hollywood movie by using aspects of a thriller, action, special effects, and fighting styles in the movie and was successfully able to transform Asian and Korean movie making for future movies. The movie was more than just revolutionary for itself because it left a legacy that paved a new road for up-and-coming directors to follow. Due to this movie Korean Film and Asian Cinema as a whole has been able to flourish and come into its own. This industry has grown far and wide and none of it would have been able to occur if not for Shiri.
Asian cinema was changed forever in 1999 when Shiri, the South Korean action blockbuster was released. The success of the Korean cinema wave was a result of Shiri. Kang Je-gyu, the director of Shiri, used Hollywood storytelling tactics, all the while keeping the content of this movie strictly Korean. From here on out, South Korean pop culture became universal. Not just with Shiri, but in various aspects of pop culture as well.
Sources
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- Koonce, Kyle. “Film Analysis of Shiri.” Film Analysis of Shiri, 1 Jan. 1970, kyle-worldcinema.blogspot.com/2008/03/film-analysis-of-shiri.html.
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- Scott, A. O. “FILM REVIEW; Balancing Tropical Fish and Mayhem.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 8 Feb. 2002, www.nytimes.com/2002/02/08/movies/film-review-balancing-tropical-fish-and-mayhem.html.