By I have been advocating here on the ROK Drop for quite sometime for Hollywood to look at the Korean War for some very good war movie material instead of the constant focus on World War II. Well to Rob Cohen’s credit he is filming a movie set during the Korean War, but I am not hopeful that this is going to be the definitive movie for the Korean Generation that Saving Private Ryan was for World War II veterans:
Western film personalities are increasingly tackling Asian productions–witness Christian Bale’s starring role in the upcoming Chinese war drama “The Heroes of Nanking.” The latest and perhaps most intriguing foray comes from Rob Cohen, the well-established director of Hollywood hits like “The Fast and the Furious” and “XXX.”
Cohen has just signed on to direct “1950,” a fact-based epic set during the Korean War about a Korean translator, an American commander and an embedded female journalist who all rescue thousands of civilians during the war. The film will follow the story of U.S. Marines in their efforts to save hundreds of thousands of civilians as the Chinese and North Korean armies advance; it will culminate with the real-life rescue by a U.S. merchant marine vessel in what is now known as the Christmas Miracle.
The movie is budgeted at about $100 million, which producers said is the largest in the history of the South Korean film industry. It will be bankrolled primarily by South Korean interests, particularly the media giant CJ Entertainment.
Although the movie will be told from the perspective of the Americans (mainly the commander, as well as the journalist Marguerite Higgins, on whose news dispatches the movie will be based), Cohen told 24 Frames that he wouldn’t shy away from ideology. “The politics will be right there on the surface,” he said. “This was a country that never should have been divided, and we’ll deal with that along with the rest of the story.” [LA Times via a reader tip]
You can read more at the link to include news that part of the film will be shot in Incheon. However, I am not getting my hopes up about this movie because I wouldn’t be surprised if the movie focuses more on sexism against the journalist instead of the heroism of the Soldiers who fought on this war. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Cohen decides to promote the Bruce Cumings version of history in regards to the Korean War with this film. Maybe I’m wrong and I’ll be presently surprised, but like I said before I’m not getting my hopes up.
By the way I wonder if the movie will at least be good enough to make my list of the Top 10 Korean War films?
10:37 pm on August 2nd, 2011 1
I dont know. I will decide after I watch the movie.
11:21 pm on August 2nd, 2011 2
Well, the outline of the movie plot would seem to steer clear of the political/ideological items the director says he’s going to put in it.
He’ll have to backstory to get in the division of the peninsula if the primary focus is after the Chinese have come into the war.
He’d have to backstory to 1945.
He’d also have to figure out how to hold his political agenda together to account for the 1948 withdrawal of US forces (with the war beginning in (1950).
He’s got his work cut out for him…
And if he really wants to focus on ideology, I don’t see how he’s going to pull that off, because the Koreans were divided by ideology (communism vs capitalism/democracy) before the war began and before the US troops arrived in 1945 (and then left).
If the US and Russians had not provided support for the factions they favored, there would still have been an ideological reconing as post-colonial forces fought for control.
If he wants to skip ideology and just look at power, he can cite the Russians and Americans for delaying the full power struggle, but he has to deal with both sides having pulled out 2 years before the war.
He might also have to deal with the fact that the peninsula would have been unified if the Chinese had not jumped in.
If I were the studio, I’d keep a sharp eye on the script…
That is a big budget to throw into a movie in which the director seems to be charting a course full of significant landmines…
11:30 pm on August 2nd, 2011 3
I checked out the reporter’s wikipedia page, and it doesn’t seem like there would be a lot of political axe grinding out of her work: Her reporting in WWII earned her the respect of MacArthur who ordered Gen. Walker to let her do her job: “Ban on women correspondents in Korea has been lifted. Marguerite Higgins is held in highest professional esteem by everyone.”
She went on after the Korean War to marry an Air Force general, so it would seem a likely guess that she wasn’t so turned off by allied bombing of North Korea (which the left championed as a war crime) that she grew to hate the US military or something along those lines.
If the focal point of the movie is a humanitarian effort to save refugees at a time the US military was reeling from perhaps the most ignominious retreat in the history of the American armed forces…I don’t see how the director is going to accomplish his stated mission….
11:32 pm on August 2nd, 2011 4
Well, yes, the studio had better keep a sharp eye on this one, given what I’ve noted above, and judging by the director’s trackrecord:
“Released on July 29, 2005 by Columbia Pictures, the film (Stealth) cost $135 million to make, but was panned by critics, and was a colossal box office bomb making only $76,932,872 worldwide, one of the biggest losses in cinematic history.”
2:21 am on August 3rd, 2011 5
#2,
Mmm…Yeah…Mmm…What USinKorea at #2,3, and 4, I guess. There’s not much more that can be said about it, except maybe that it’s great for the local econom…Oh, right. CJ is financing the movie.
5:16 am on August 3rd, 2011 6
Marguerite Higgins was as anti-communist as anyone else in Korea at the time.
They may try to show some or all of the US Generals as morons (since there is some evidence of that in their willful ignorance about Chinese intervention and war-fighting skills); but I sincerely doubt they could claim they were basing the story on Higgins’ dispatches and look at all sympathetic to the Nork or Chicom armies or governments… The people trying to get away, sure!
They might not be quoting the Captain of the Meredith Victory; but I hope they do: http://www.shipofmiracles.com/10.html
5:21 am on August 3rd, 2011 7
USinKorea 3, Marguerite Higgins wrote conservative, pro-military, anti-communist commentary.
Once, within the past couple of years, Joshua Stanton said he wouldn’t defend the bombing of North Korea, because it was indefensible. I don’t know how to search for that on his blog.
5:53 am on August 3rd, 2011 8
If a site doesn’t have a search feature, use Google’s advanced search feature and plug the site’s url into the box to search it only.
Here is one where Joshua mentions the bombing.
Since he’s a lawyer, and since he’s probably read more on the Korean War than I have, he might know better, but I’d have to look into it myself. Because I did some checking on the Dresden war crime idea, and I came away more irritated than I was when I began.
I know One Free Korea isn’t some reflexive liberal, and a key phrase in his statement is “by today’s standards”, but the look into Dresden has tainted me on such topics.
(For that matter, Bruce Cumings, who was mentioned recently in the comments, built an entire career out of trying to make Korea Vietnam, distorting history out of recognition trying to make one period in history fit another.)
5:57 am on August 3rd, 2011 9
Thank you, USinKorea 8, that was good advice on searching technique.
And I think you’re right, that firestorm in Dresden must have been gosh-darned irritating.
7:52 am on August 3rd, 2011 10
Yes. Too bad all the things that made mechanized warfare in an industrial age possible were not located out in unoccupied fields and on moutains…
Maybe we can pass some UN laws where opposing sides can only use paintball guns and fight in pre-approved gaming ranges…
7:58 am on August 3rd, 2011 11
It might help too if concerned writers would write gripping, horrific, compelling stories about bullets tearing through the flesh, shattering bones, collapsing lungs, and gushing the blood of uniformed soldiers onto soil. I’m pretty sure napalm burns their skin about the same…
Then maybe we could get warfare as a whole made illegal.
I’m sure that would put an end to them…
(The problem I have with things contemporaries like to write about Dresden it is ends up looking to me like nothing more than a dick stroking circle jerk for people who want to feel better about themselves…)
4:56 pm on August 3rd, 2011 12
Here is a sci-fi movie to be made titled “The DMZ Project”
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/08/02/2011080200678.html
5:13 pm on August 3rd, 2011 13
That could be an interesting movie, Tbonetylr. I wonder if Agent Orange dumping along the DMZ will play a role.
5:35 pm on August 3rd, 2011 14
Those who like to claim the US committed “war crimes” in defeating the Nazis/Japanese in WW2 or the Communists in Korea seem to imagine that “bloodless” means to defeat the tyrants were available. And they try to maintain that the people supporting the governments that commit _actual_ genocide and _actual_ war crimes are somehow innocent of the crimes thet facilitate.
These authors all write their self-righteous books from the protection of a society made safe for them by the blood of the patriots who died protecting them.
Shame on them and their sycophants.
5:50 pm on August 3rd, 2011 15
I’m sympathetic to your view, Brainiac, but at the same time, maybe we are a better society for asking tough questions about our own own actions in wartime.
Was the bombing of civilian targets in Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki necessary to end the war in Europe or the Pacific sooner? It’s worth asking.
7:21 pm on August 3rd, 2011 16
We’ll be a better society when we start asking the tough questions about what the hell our financial institutions, defense contractors, and politicians are doing in war time.
7:39 pm on August 3rd, 2011 17
If we could just pass a law making X illegal, X would go away.
That always works well.
8:10 pm on August 3rd, 2011 18
“Those who like to claim the US committed “war crimes” in defeating the Nazis/Japanese in WW2 or the Communists in Korea seem to imagine that “bloodless” means to defeat the tyrants were available.”
If judged by today’s standards, yes there were war crimes committed. Furthermore, the indiscriminate firebombing of Dresden was questionable, even by the laws which were already in place during WW2.
“Article 27: In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps should be taken to spare as far as possible edifices devoted to religion, art, science, and charity, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not used at the same time for military purposes.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_bombardment_and_international_law#International_law_up_to_1945
3:57 am on August 4th, 2011 19
kushibo 15, you forgot Hamburg and Tokyo. By the way, the Nazis also competed in this contest. The repository of all knowledge says, beyond those occurring naturally:
Firestorms can also be deliberate effects of targeted explosives such as occurred as a result of the aerial bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Stalingrad, Tokyo, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima[1] (but not Nagasaki) and The Blitz during World War II.
5:33 am on August 4th, 2011 20
So now the Teadrinker and Glans suggest that acts designed to force the Nazis to surrender are “war crimes”.
How quaint. How sanctimonious. And how utterly devoid of context or understanding.
How does one defeat a Nazi War Machine, one wonders? Perhaps by throwing well-reasoned arguments at it? Maybe it is susceptible to hunger strikes in the Konzentrationslager? Surely one can fight a bloodless war using the technology of the 1940s, even in the face of the obliteration of Rotterdam, the Warsaw Ghetto, the Rape of Nanking, and the Holocaust…
When one enters a war, dear children, there are three ways to fight it. Unconditional surrender, halfhearted resistance, and “All In”. The Jews surrendered and went to the camps. The French resisted halfheartedly and Paris fell in six weeks. The English and Americans went All-In and won. But not quickly and not without a horrific number of casualties…
Revisionist historians like Toland and Cummings love to twist what we know around what they want us to believe so they can sell books. Some people will eat these crap sandwiches as long as they have a coupon…
5:58 am on August 4th, 2011 21
Man, low intensity versus high intensity conflict stability and counterinsurgency vs. conventional offensive and defensive operations…
I think the way you fight a war depends on the type of war.
6:30 am on August 4th, 2011 22
The poet Robert Lowell shocked his patrician family by refusing to serve in WWII. He wasn’t a pacificist (something I could at least respect).
In his letter explaining why, he said that he’d have gladly served after Pearl Harbor, but, by the time he was drafted, Germany and Japan were so clearly defeated, and fighting for unconditional surrender so uncouth, it would inflict on the peoples of the belligerents such destruction and humiliation, they might never recover from it.
He went on to say that perhaps no other people had experienced such inhumane treatement since Southerns in the Civil War.
I’m from Georgia. Where I’m from was on Sherman’s march to the sea. I’m glad he came.
Slavery was an evil institution and reestabilishinn the union probably saved the history of North America from facing the same kind of recurrent, fracticidal conflicts other regions have faced the last few hundred years.
I’m glad novelists and poets and academics safe in ivory towers weren’t around back then to write myoptic, heart-tugging tales of gore and horror leading the kind-hearted souls up North to accept a more “honorable” peace deal that would have left much of the South in tact and as was.
Ditto for the fascist regimes of the Axis.
Lowell was an @ss. At least he was living in that time. (Well, I guess I could have cut him some slack if he had been French or Belgian or some European who had directly suffered under the threat and then actual onslaught of the Axis powers….War wasn’t quiet hell in Boston in WWII…)
The problem I have with the material I’ve read on Dresden and the like is that – again – it comes off to me as nothing more than intellectual masturbation. And not even with the risk of autoerotic asphyxiation.
It feels good to grab my member and stroke away, feeling so big and magnanums while I can talk down what is considered the crowning achievement of what others call “the greatest generation”, because — I grew up in a world where the fascist, horrible regimes of the Axis powers were gotten rid of and the peoples in them were helped to rebuilt into fairly magnificent nations……
7:18 am on August 4th, 2011 23
Yep sherman burned down the courthouse in our ancestoral lands in georgia also, but the kangaji finds it ironic the victims of sherman advocate and understand total war as just war.
1:39 pm on August 4th, 2011 24
Kangaji needs to study a bit more about Georgia before he shoots “hisself” in the foot again…
The rulers of the south were the Plantation owners. The rich elite. And the CSA Constitution looked a lot more like the Soviet version than the one we have today. It was aimed at keeping power where they thought it belonged. With the wealthy land owners.
The common people–whites and blacks–actually ended up better off, for the most part. Reconstruction was a pain everywhere. Carpetbaggers and corruption were rampant. But that goes along with every government project.
4:38 pm on August 4th, 2011 25
24 Uh, I think you missed his point. I’m pretty sure he was agreeing with me about the benefits of the Civil War including Sherman’s march to the sea.
4:42 pm on August 4th, 2011 26
In his biography, Winston Churchill was said to have been horrified by the images and analysis of allied bombing of France in preparation for D-Day. If I remember correctly, he had to start skip briefing papers for awhile.
The world became a better place for it…
7:13 pm on August 4th, 2011 27
25 exactry
7:20 pm on August 4th, 2011 28
Well in that case I do apologize.
Words matter. The “victims” of Sherman were the Plantation owners who lost property and the blacks who thought they were to be freed and followed Sherman only to be left behind to face the wrath of the people left in power whose big houses were all burned like Tara in GWTW…
For the benefit of those like me who had their sense of humor removed at birth, please use the emoticons?
7:24 pm on August 4th, 2011 29
Churchill’s biography was a version of “revised and extended remarks” based more on how he wanted to be seen than absolute truth. That being said, he was a very brave and gallant man who did some things that needed to be done and unlike certain other leaders of his day, never grew to like doing them…
7:48 pm on August 4th, 2011 30
I hope the movie shows the bravery of the ROK soldiers & the US & allied forces. The reason that the Korean war, like the Vietnam war was not won was due to political reasons. It was not due to any lack in the military forces resisting communist North Korean & Red Chinese aggression. My Dad served in WW2 in the pacific. Had President Truman not made the decision to drops the atomic bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki I and millions of others might never have been born. This historical revisionism really makes me sick.
8:11 pm on August 4th, 2011 31
well but chinese’ 300,000 troops were unstoppable in the begining because usa thought china would never intervine.
8:43 pm on August 4th, 2011 32
31 That is something the director could wrap the US on the knuckles about in the movie. It fits the time frame, adds drama to the main story of the refugees, and is something historians have been doing since the war. They see it as one of the black marks on MacArthur’s record.
29 I was thinking about the Martin Gilbert biography. I had one British professor who said it was the “authorized” biography – with a derogatory tone, but I thought it was well-sourced and informative.
3:02 am on August 5th, 2011 33
You know, you can find a copy of Marguerite Higgins’ WAR IN KOREA online fairly easily. It’s a pretty interesting book about that first year of combat, well worth reading. It briefly mentions her problems covering the Korean War from the front lines because of being a woman, but there is certainly no axe-grinding (many of her problems came from her Herald colleague, who did not want the competition so lied and tried to send her back to Tokyo). For the most part, it is solid anti-Red stuff. Higgins was one damn tough dame.
5:12 am on August 5th, 2011 34
#24 Setnaffa, The rulers of the south were the “rich elite”? Not at all like it is today RIGHT?
Please name a country that is not ruled by those with the money, and coming from an “elite” background.
As you later said, “the common people blacks and whites ended up better off” after the war. Wouldn’t that be the people that became part of the USA after the war?
So with that statement you admit that the USA itself is led by the “rich elite” ALSO.
You further state that the CSA Constitution, “looked a lot more like the Soviet version than the one we have today.”.
I disagree. So justify that statement. Where in the CSA does it look like the Soviet model? Here is a link to the CSA constitution and the changes that were made.
Please point out the SOVIET influence —
http://www.civilwarhome.com/csconstitution.htm
I look forward to being educated! Maybe it is there and I missed it.