This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

Flash forward from 1988 to ‘03. It’s the future. The beast is out of his cage and loose in the age of information—like seeing your own reflection for the first time, a world full of mirrors & flickering unknowns. In the past: Oh Dae-Su was drugged by a man he doesn’t know—he’s wronged too many people to even hazard a guess at who would target him. The captor placed him in an interstice before the data flash flood. For fifteen years Dae-Su sat in a hotel room with a television set and the same daily meal of fried dumplings heavy on the scallions. Now he’s been deposited back in the land of the living and needs answers. He needs to get connected; he needs to log on. 

He reconnects quickly with his best friend No Joo-Hwan, who conveniently now runs an internet café. His captor trolls online chatrooms as “evergreen” and Dae-Su has to reciprocate; he has to play the game which his eternal foe has set. First, the screenname: monster@nate.com. 

It takes a while for Dae-Su to get the plot, or to figure out that vengeance is just a search engine away. Running it back again to when the monster first reawakens on an office rooftop, he barely even knows what he’s made for until he lurches towards the first sight of something human, arms half-cocked and hands drooping. There, ahead of him: a stranger clinging to his white miniature poodle. He’s leaning over the ledge: He’s ready to take hks life, and his little dog’s too. Dae-Su interrupts the white collar crisis and throttles him by the necktie because a living being has to hear his tale of misfortune, now (this is the cold open; now the film runs it back). 

Dae-Su used to have faces on the TV set to keep him company: Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein puffing on a cigar and laughing, the old man offscreen laughing with him; a pop idol with a siren song for the pent up hermit that’s too short to ever let him finish. Artificial pleasures kept him close to satisfaction, but now he has to let it all out. He trained in martial arts against an outline on the wall and developed the formal phrasing of an autodidact—he collects aphorisms, like the one which he lays on this be-dogged stranger: “Even though I’m no better than a beast, don’t I have the right to live, no?”

What’s living and what’s dying doesn’t matter so much as the trajectory. The whole world’s gone jagged, prickly. No more desire, only desserts, only justice in its mechanical form. Kill you the virtual pleasure of it: the distance between hammer and face tic-ticking as you calculate. Pause. Think about what you’re about to do. Not the man in the chair but the A —> B action. 

The image from Bride of Frankenstein provides the difference between then and now. During this brief respite from the scientists who use him as means to an end and the masses who see him as an aberration, the Monster finds his way into a blind man’s hut. From this happenstance the Monster learns “bread”, “wine”, “friend”. The cigar is a lesson in luxury: sometimes what’s good has nothing to do with what’s necessary. Dae-Su on the other hand walks away before the man opposite him can reciprocate. He’s done his deed and needs to keep moving. He’ll need to sample a dozen different dumplings across town just to trigger his sense memory and trace the delivery back to his prison. Food here is less than pleasure. 

The stranger hits a car roof just as Dae-Su walks away from the building. The Monster that media made couldn’t care because he was incubated by an increasingly miasmic world. As he tries to dig his way out of the hotel, a timelapse of his struggle gets a split screen with a montage of news clips marking the time. Some are evergreen for any viewer: Princess Diana’s death, The attacks on the World Trade Center. Others are more geographically specific, like the 1995 arrest of former president Chun Doo-Hwan. Progress is what we call the benefits of civilization, but it is also little more than the act of moving forward.

Oh Dae-Su gets connected to the world wide web. He reaches out prisoner to prisoner so he can learn and learns so he can kill. Goons pile onto him but his lateral movement is pure. Nobody can stop you when you’re moving in 2D. When you forget who you are. When you give in to the 21st century disaster patchwork caving in on you all of a sudden. When everyone is a victim of their own trust, all you can rely on is blunt force.