The Hypocrisy In The World Of Korean War Films

Every nation has a conflict in their history which makes them a nation, no matter how long time ago it had happened. For former colonies, that might be an independence war. For the former empires, that might be a glorious victory or a shameful defeat. As for Korean people, that was the Korean War. The conflict that turned the people of the same blood into the enemies cannot be forgotten for a long time. As for a person who had seen many war films, mostly Soviet films about The Great Patriotic War, I was highly interested in discovering the world of the Korean War films..

For certain political reasons, film directors in South Korea were not able to express the messages in the war films that they do now. Governmental censorship was strongly affecting

Instead, the war itself is the enemy. The hell on Earth, where people of the same ethnicity slaughter each other, is nothing like it was portrayed in The Marines Who Never Returned, where the squad of the highly-disciplined soldiers kill communists as if those were the wooden targets. The film clearly shows the hypocrisy of the government in several scenes. While claiming that North Koreans are nothing but a dictatorship that does not care about its people, the same thing applies to the Southern side, too. It can be clearly seen in the scene where Jin-seok is forced to draft, and when he and his brother Jin-tae arrive to their first battle. Before the clashes begin, they eat the poorly cooked rice balls. One of the soldiers starts complaining about the food quality. Indeed, the government that would care of its soldiers would make a better ration. But it seems that they do not want to spend their scarce resources on the soldiers who would die in the battle anyway. The soldiers’ bravery and motivation to fight for the country is yet another governmental claim that gets debunked in the film. When Jin-tae enters the train, he sees a group of highly patriotic volunteered soldiers, chanting nationalistic slogans. But once he goes to another train, he sees a much larger group of people drafted by force, sitting in silence. This is a great allegory to the people of South Korea: while a minority of highly active people were enthusiastically greeting the beginning of the war, most of the population had to suffer, though they did not want any violence at