Primer is The A.V. Club‘s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
Mickey 17 is Bong Joon Ho’s biggest English-language film yet. The slapstick sci-fi blockbuster that satirizes the industrial commodification of labor is also his long-awaited follow-up to Parasite, a historic Best Picture winner that satirized domestic labor dependency in Korea. The man loves his pet themes, but they’re themes shared by many Korean sci-fi writers and directors. Sci-fi has a long-standing popularity within South Korea, dating back to early translations of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells at the start of the 20th century. But while it makes sense that speculative fiction about future societies and imaginative technology would be popular in a country that has gone through military occupations, rampant industrialization, and traditional values blending with capitalist hierarchies in the past hundred years (all while bordering a forbidden and dangerous mirror country), Korean sci-fi is so far more a literary tradition than a cinematic one.
Major writers like Djuna, Kim Bo-young, Bae Myung-hoon, and Soyeon Jeong are products of the ’90s boom of sci-fi that intersected with the rise of online communities and webzines, but K-cinema’s historical rise, fall, and rise again—from the ’60s Golden Era, to government censorship, to today’s global media industry (run by family-owned megacorps known as “chaebols”)—has resulted in more supernatural horrors, cop thrillers, and historical dramas than sci-fi spectacles. But that hasn’t stopped artists like Bong Joon Ho, Kim Jee-woon, and Jang Joon-hwan from pushing the boundaries of sci-fi in popular Korean cinema, adding existential and political depth to their eye-catching, genre-friendly popcorn premises.
Korean literature and film often view the world through the lens of science fiction in similar ways: a fear of corporate and military hegemony; predictions of environmental ruin that benefits the already powerful; self-actualization, humanism, and resistance meshing to forge a new, achievable survival in desperate, changing times.
Korean Sci-Fi 101: Mainstream Auteurs
The international renown and Oscar glory of Bong Joon Ho makes him an outlier in the field of Korean sci-fi filmmakers. The fact that three of his genre works star Western actors points to the fact that Korean directors use the availability of Hollywood budgets to pull off spectacles that are less available in K-cinema. (In 2023, the average Korean production budget was about $2 million.) Even if the trade-off is working for provably anti-art executives like Harvey Weinstein, Ted Sarandos, or David Zaslav, the increased scope of Bong’s sci-fi has led to bolder, clearer predictions of the omnipresent danger of living within corporate and militaristic hierarchies. Bong’s sole Korean-language sci-fi film, The Host is a monster film within a punishing satire of government and military conspiracy, where a hapless, impoverished father Park Gang-du (Song Kang-ho) emerges as an unlikely hero to rescue his young daughter from the clutches of a mutated, water-dwelling monster.
In an arresting, thrilling sequence, the monster bursts from the Han River and stampedes along the riverbank, flinging civilians into the air and crushing innocent bystanders. As a mandated medical quarantine follows in the monster’s wake, the family at the center of The Host scramble to assign blame and reconstitute themselves around the loss of their youngest relative. Beginning as a modern, ground-level kaiju film, The Host soon demonstrates Bong’s appetite for shifting genres within a single film, becoming a paranoid outbreak film and conspiracy thriller by the midpoint while never losing its family drama focus—while also referencing the types of pro-democracy protests that have been violently quashed in recent Korean history. The sci-fi monster remains the narrative linchpin but, like Godzilla before it, The Host dramatizes the response to the monster’s arrival on both a micro, human scale and on an institutional one. The conflict between a society enforcing its will and the ignorant but driven individuals trying to create a better existence is the stuff of timeless sci-fi.
“Resisting the official narrative” is a core theme in Snowpiercer, Bong’s English-language debut that was dumped by The Weinstein Company when the director refused Harvey’s changes—which was the style at the time. Based on a French graphic novel, Snowpiercer takes place in an icy post-apocalypse, where the only survivors circumnavigate the globe on an ever-moving train that separates its rich and poor passengers in the front and rear carriages. Led by born-and-raised revolutionary Curtis (Chris Evans), the “Tailies” see their path to liberation as a strictly linear one—fight from the back to the front of the train to seize power for themselves. But Bong’s film complicates this assumption, pushing past the obvious pleasures of the premise and questioning the certainty of the characters’ mission. Curtis is reminded in brutal, sobering ways that holding the most power in a broken system will not lead to justice and equality. You can’t fix the wrongs of Snowpiercer while the train is still on the rails.
Compared to Snowpiercer, Bong’s sci-fi follow-up Okja has a much broader, looser tone, but the story of Okja, a giant, genetically engineered, CG “superpig” torn from Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun), the young Korean girl who loves him best, goes for the emotional jugular until it fills the audience with rage and heartbreak. Across his pre-Mickey 17 sci-fi films, Bong moves from protesters, to rebels, to anarchists as he dramatizes a fight against the state’s stranglehold on truth, extractivism, and violence. The mix of white and Korean actors in Okja serves a political point—the industrialists and scientists responsible for the superpigs travel to Mija’s rural mountaintop home to claim its most valuable resource, and young Mija becomes the heartbroken and defiant face of international victims of globalism against a sea of white corporate faces. When Korean actors Song Kang-ho and Go Ah-sung turn up in Snowpiercer, Curtis has to earn their trust and solidarity, all while navigating their language barrier. Okja says that Western industry is at odds with a symbol of Korea’s future; Snowpiercer conveys the barrier between American and Korean underclasses, only for their shared class struggle to transcend it.
Winding back the clock, Jang Joon-hwan’s Save The Green Planet! is a sci-fi movie with a twist—or should that be a question mark? Released in 2003 alongside far more commercially successful Korean titles like Oldboy, Memories Of Murder, and A Tale Of Two Sisters, Jang’s film is much closer in spirit to the early works of Bong Joon Ho and Kim Jee-woon than their later sci-fi blockbusters, featuring a protagonist who can’t distinguish between a complex reality of systemic injustice and the convenient solution of extra-terrestrial infiltration ruining the world. A grieving beekeeper who kidnaps a chemical conglomerate CEO on suspicion of being a disguised alien plotting to destroy Earth, Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun)’s obsession with sci-fi archetypes alienates him from processing the trauma of his parents suffering life-altering violence at the hands of their industrial employers—a part of real Korean history. That Save the Green Planet! ultimately validates Lee’s conspiracy is a grim, absurd punchline. Jang and Bong’s sci-fi visions aren’t just about critiquing Korea’s present, but also folding in history to emphasize how the seeds for dystopia were planted much earlier. If the past and present speak the same unjust language, then what will the future look like?
Intermediate Studies: Escapist Entertainment
If you’re looking for dynamic, melodramatic, and tightly orchestrated thrills, Korean sci-fi has you covered. In recent years, there’s been a rise of Korean sci-fi films releasing on streaming—like Space Sweepers, Jung_E, or The Call—which wouldn’t have been produced had global interest in K-dramas and streaming content not skyrocketed since before the pandemic. Unlike auteur projects, these Korean sci-fi films prioritize being commercial, entertaining vehicles with less of a directorial stamp, and as they broaden their appeal to streaming viewers, you can trace the influence of American, Japanese, and Hong Kong cinema in these films.
Space Sweepers, directed by Jo Sung-hee, cost twice as much as The Host, which was one of the most expensive independent features made in Korea, long before OTT streaming platforms gave Korea the competitive edge to bankroll so much expensive sci-fi. In Korea’s first space opera, a band of junk traders scour the solar system for valuable space debris and discover a child robot with a built-in weapon of mass destruction—as if their current problems of megacorps, private militias, pervasive debt, and loan sharks weren’t enough. Like many films inspired by the cobbled-together decor and spirited, adventurous tone of Star Wars (and Guardians Of The Galaxy, another major and recent influence), the lore and social critique in Space Sweepers is mostly in service of character drama, which richens the bonds of loyalty, friendship, and humanist duty that conquer their punishing, divisive reality. It’s less thoughtful than Bong’s sci-fi, but it also has a robot take down a fleet of spaceships.
Further blurring the line between social critique and crowd-pleasing spectacle is Illang: The Wolf Brigade. Director Kim Jee-woon’s films have always had a sure grip on the language, expectations, and limitations of genre—his psychological horror A Tale Of Two Sisters, gangster parable A Bittersweet Life, and Western comedy The Good, The Bad, The Weird are all propulsive updates to their respective cinematic traditions. In the 2010s, his work started to feel less personal and more digestible (something corrected by his recent film industry satire, Cobweb), but this adaptation of Japanese artist Mamoru Oshii’s Kerberos Panzer Cop maintains Kim’s expert action geography and genre atmosphere throughout.
Previously adapted as the anime film Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade and the live-action The Red Spectacles, Oshii’s manga is set in a dystopian, heavily militarized Japan; Illang updates the setting to 2029 Korea on the verge of reuniting with the North, with paramilitary cops in heavy metal exoskeleton suits hunting down terrorists threatening the historic reunification. Korea trying to compete with the cultural dominance of Japanese media is nothing new—check out Yongary, Monster From The Deep, a 1967 kaiju film that tried to compete with Toho’s Godzilla—but Kim’s Illang is more of an attempt to transpose Oshii’s critique of state violence to a country with its own difficult relationship to military dominance and political turmoil. That doesn’t mean Illang skimps on the mech-suits-with-gatling-guns action, with the film hammering home the brute force aggression of The Wolf Brigade against dubiously subversive forces.
Large-scale sci-fi spectacle in Korea was not novel to the streaming age: After the blockbuster success of action film Shiri in 1999 (itself a product of the country’s ’90s economic boom), Korean producers bankrolled action films modeled after the heights of explosive Hollywood and Hong Kong cinema. One sci-fi highlight is Natural City, a riff on Philip K. Dick’s artificial intelligence fiction and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which focuses on a cyborg-hunting soldier trying to find a human host for his android lover’s consciousness before her machine body expires. If you wanted to know what Blade Runner directed by a John Woo devotee would look like, director Min Byeong-cheon delivers: Natural City is a slick, music video-aesthetic romp through romantic melodrama, brotherly betrayal, martial arts wirework, and heroic bloodshed—all paired with long shots of characters considering the fragility of humanity in a compromised world.
Advanced Studies: Deep Cut Shorts, Indies, And Experiments
For those willing to explore Korean sci-fi further, there is a wealth of short-form films that may not get the exposure enjoyed by big-budget productions, but take advantage of the hyper-specificity allowed by their shorter runtime. In the anthology Doomsday Book, Kim Jee-woon whet his sci-fi whistle with The Heavenly Creature, a 40-minute chapter featuring a defective robotic laborer at a Buddhist monastery, who claims to have achieved enlightenment and has started preaching. As the robotics manufacturers swoop into the temple to debate the monks on the dangers of their product exhibiting such advanced thought, a young technician (Kim Kang-woo) quietly contemplates the value of the life he is paid to repair or scrap for parts. You can’t imagine a more essential sci-fi premise than this: technology understands humanity to a better degree than it was designed for, causing social and capitalist friction and a tense philosophical debate. The Heavenly Creature bypasses its limited resources by aiming squarely at ideas that the viewer must navigate along with the characters.
The diverse array of voices on the OTT anthology series SF8 offers a small-screen portrait of artists levelling with the crises promised in Korea’s future. The episode “Joan’s Galaxy” is set in a world devastated by dust, where only a subset of the population receive the necessary antibodies to live past 30. A student, Yi-Oh (Choi Sung-eun), learns that she never received the antibodies she grew up thinking she did, and turns to her classmate Joan (Kim Bo-ra), who lives in a community of people aware of their shortened lifespan and have completely reoriented their attitudes towards life as a consequence. It’s sweet and affecting, modelled on the teen melodrama from the canon of K-dramas and novels, while challenging the fatalistic anxiety of young people growing up in a degrading climate catastrophe. An indie sci-fi film with similar sensitive, introspective drama, the low-budget Nabi by Moon Seung-wook tracks the interpersonal turmoil of an “oblivion virus” that erases memories and has started its own tourism industry.
On the surface, there’s nothing sensitive about Teenage Hooker Becomes A Killing Machine—the title quite clearly signals the one-hour film’s lurid, in-your-face provocations. Shot on lo-res video, Killing Machine has the seedy, exploitation premise of a high school sex worker (So-yun Lee) who is kidnapped and murdered by a ludicrously evil teacher (Dae-tong Kim), before finding catharsis as a reconstructed cyborg avenger who blows away her former tormentors. It’s trash art, a Korean Inland Empire, which compliments blood-gushing body horror and robot sci-fi with aching, haunting long shots of breathless confessions and over-exposed dreamlike happiness. It’s nothing like anything else on this list, perverting bodies, cinematic styles, and boundaries between genres, ending up as a weird, stunning object of sci-fi revenge delirium. It leaves one with a bad taste, an appreciation for how queasy and hollow the catharsis of genre excess can be…and an unsated hunger for lowbrow, indie Korean genre film.
