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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Peter Bradshaw

Hope review – non-stop gonzo alien battling is top-quality entertainment

A woman aims a rifle while standing through a car door opening, surrounded by dust or smoke. K-megastar Jung Ho-yeon in Hope.
Gutsy rookie cop … K-megastar Jung Ho-yeon in Hope. Photograph: Courtesy Cannes film festival

Some uproarious rock’n’roll moviemaking from Korean director Na Hong-jin, a sci-fi action thriller mixing digital work with old-school analogue entertainment values, serving up a spectacle with cheeky touches of Spielberg, Walter Hill and one other director and movie franchise that it would be unsporting to specify at this stage.

We are in the remote and sleepy retirees’ town of Hope in South Korea near the demilitarised zone (DMZ), where people already constitutionally used to the possibility of war and bloodshed, are astonished to hear of a farm animal killed and mangled – though not for food – by an unidentified beast.

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