21 October, 2013

R-Point


Arpointeu (2004), South Korea

Director : Su-Chang Kong

Synopsis
A mysterious and disturbing radio call is received by the South Korean troops during the Vietnam War in 1972. Strangely enough, the message comes from a unit that had previously been dispatched to a zone called R-Point six months before and long assumed to be death. Accordingly, a new unit led by lieutenant Choi Tae-in is sent to investigate, having seven days to find out any traces of the disappeared soldiers. As the soldiers enter the R-Point, a frightening island seemingly devoid of human presence, a bizarre message written in a rock comes across – "He who sheds others’ blood cannot return".

Review
R-Point is extremely competent as a horror movie with a suspense-filled plot. An abandoned mansion, a soldier following a silent ghost unit believing he is following his own unit, a French cemetery appearing during a storm, a nerve-wracking tension particularly well constructed and developed. As the plot is played out, the pacing slowly increases and the viewer is allowed to question the veracity of the events. Is this a ghost story? Or are these ghosts only the result of dementia and isolation of a group of fatigued soldiers during the Vietnam war? Visually wise, the movie is particularly well-shot, capturing the growing paranoia felt by each soldier throughout the film, which as a major impact in the horror atmosphere that is intended to be created throughout the film. The locations – an enormous abandoned mansion or a jungle, for example – and the extremely adverse meteorological conditions were particularly well chosen for a horror movie set. The wartime setting serving as a backdrop for a horror movie served as a thoroughgoing experience of the fears, paranoia and inhumanity of a group of soldiers during the war. 

Apart from both the Lieutenant Choi and the Sergeant Jin, the characters are unfortunately mostly uninteresting, few to near none information is provided for each one of the soldiers appearing during the movie. The acting stays nonetheless competent and the supposed military skills of the characters are fairly observed throughout the movie. Woo-Seong Kam delivers once again an interesting performance in the same year Spider Forest came out. As the Korean troops were not particularly seen as heroes when the Vietnam conflict came to an end, the movie seems to suggest that even without blood on their hands (as the movie proves for more than once), each soldier was haunted during the movie, which may allow the viewer to conclude that the fact that they were soldiers in the Vietnam conflict was already enough.


A few flaws can however be easily pointed out. The presence of the presumptuous American troops was for instance particularly unnecessary, with dialogues being extremely awkward to say the least, and the attitude of the American soldiers seemingly being out of place during the referred scenes. Furthermore, from this point on, the viewer knows that for each character death will be certain, which allied to a poor character development, allows an obvious lack of interest for each secondary character. My major concern at the end of the movie relies however on the number of questions that the film does not answer. Although several movies allow the viewer to actively participate in the end, unfortunately with R-Point the atmosphere of extreme incertitude and the number of unanswered questions for the sequence of events are considerably unsatisfying. 

In the current cinematographic panorama, R-Point will serve most importantly as a refreshing change of pace in the horror genre, with a particularly interesting and historical background in which horror and mystery are furthermore satisfactorily conjugated. 

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