The Battle of Jangsari - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Battle of Jangsari



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:


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Movie
To top it off for the day we have a SECOND film from South Korea to enjoy, albeit slightly different from Parasite. To say that the North Koreans and South Koreans have some bad blood between the two nations is a bit of an understatement. North Korea has kind of been at the forefront of the news lately, with obvious hopes that the communist nation of North Korea could make some amends with the world, as well as mend fences with their brothers in the south. However, I’m not so sure that the South Koreans are as instantly forgiving of the northerners and what they did some 70 years ago as we in the west will be. Just looking at the film The Battle of Jangsari is enough to see that the blood between them is most definitely a bit sour. It’s a rock-em sock-em war movie in the vein of Saving Private Ryan in which they very obviously demonize the North Koreans, and instill some patriotism among the South Korean audience.

I’m a big fan of war movies in general, and movies about the Korean, Vietnam and World Wars are some of my favorites to view. As such I went into The Battle of Jansgsari with a good amount of hope due to the high level of excellent films that have been pouring out of South Korea recently. And while I did enjoy some of the more exciting battle scenes, and the emotional pathos was high at times, I just couldn’t get into it at all. It may resonate more powerfully with it’s intended audience in South Korea, but as a westerner I had a very difficult time connecting some of the emotional dots, and the American scenes just felt a bit choppy and cliched.

Right around the start of the Korean War there was an infamous suicide like mission led by youth soldiers (according to the articles I read, the average age of the soldiers was 17 years old) as a diversionary tactic on Jangsari beach, so that General McArthur’s “Operation Chromite” could be unleashed on the Northerners. It was a suicide mission and the South Korean command new it. If they got those men on the beach they were most likely dead, and if those boy soldiers could in fact take Jangsari, there was no real way off of it. However, as fate would have it, the platoon not only took the beach, but diverted the North Koreans enough to get “Operation Chromite” underway. However, there was no way off that beach until the U.S. naval forces intervened and staged a rescue mission to pull them off. Headed by General Stevens (George Eads), the navy was able to pull most of the soldiers off the beach, as they were bombarded by North Korean forces.

A lot of The Battle of Jangsari feels like it was pulled from the same vein as Saving Private Ryan. As I said above, you’d be hard pressed not to notice the similarities the visual direction, as well as some of the fictional situations that the soldiers are put in. I’m also pretty sure that Asian audiences will get more out of this one than westerners, but still I’m not so sure it will be a whole lot more, as the plot really didn’t allow us to get close enough to any one soldier to really feel something for them. As a whole it’s great to see some light being shed on a rather important, but generally forgotten, battle that helped the Incheon invasion. But as I said, the movie didn’t really anchor us emotionally to the characters outside of watching their pain and suffering on screen.




Rating:

Not Rated by the MPAA




Video:

Will The Battle of Jangsari is distributed here in the U.S. it was actually co-produced over in Korea by Warner Brothers Korean branch. The film comes to Blu-ray with a very satisfactory looking image. There’s several different color grading schemes going on here, with the American Base scenes, and the scenes inside the troop transport ship being very heavily bathed in that sickly yellow look that’s meant to imitate the Vietnam and Korean war era. Outside on the beaches and during the battles it’s much more neutral in tone. Colors are strong, and earth and dark tones tend to dominate. Blacks are usually very good, but some of the darker scenes do have some pretty noticeable banding to them.








Audio:

The 5.1 DTS-HD MA Korean track is very robust and powerful, as you would expect from a war movie. There’s a few scenes with George Eads and Megan Fox that are naturally in English, but 90% of the movie is fully Korean based with English subtitles (which did have a few awkwardly phrased translations I noticed). The action oriented track is full of gunfire, explosions, and the shrieking of planes dropping bombs overhead. Dialog is still well placed and perfectly balanced, while the cacophony of death and destruction rips through the surrounds and mains. Bass is powerful and deep, with lots and lots of low end moments that really shake into the low 20 hz range.










Extras:

• Making of
• Trailer A
• Trailer B
• U.S. Trailer

Final Score: ​

I really like war movies, and I wanted to like The Battle of Jangsari more than I did, but the lack of emotional resonance was just too prevalent. I liked some of the war scenes, but it just never really resonated (which seems to be a common themes among the other reviewers that I know). HOWEVER, the movie was very obviously made with good intentions and was meant to give honor to the boys who fought their way to freedom back in the 1950s. I will say that it’s kind of funny to watch the promotion over here in the U.S. vs. over in Korea. If you watch the international trailers, Megan Fox and George Eads aren’t even mentioned, and barely seen, but the U.S. Blu-ray cover and the trailer have their names and faces plastered all over it. I guess it was a way to sell it more easily to U.S. audiences, even though their roles were fairly minimal. Overall, a solid Blu-ray with good technical specs, but a saddeningly weak storyline to go along with it. Rental is my recommendation.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Megan Fox, George Eads, David Lee McInnis, Minho Choi, Myung-Min Kim, In-kwon Kim, Si-Yan Kwak, Jae-Wook Lee, Chul-min Lee
Directed by: Kyung-taek Kwak
Written by: Man-Hee Lee, Brian Chung (English Scenes), Cory Gustke (English Scenes)
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 AVC
Audio: Korean: DTS-HD MA 5.1, Korean DD 2.0
Subtitles: English
Studio: Well Go USA
Rated: NR
Runtime: 104 minutes
Blu-Ray Release Date: January 28th, 2020

Recommendation: Rental

 

[tripplej]

Thanks for the review. I will catch it also as a rental once available on amazon prime/netflix.