Preppers, survivalists, Rapture fans and doomsday cultists may get a kick out of “The Great Flood,” a downbeat-to-the-point-of-bleak thriller about the End of Human Civilization.
A young Korean mother (Kim Da-Mi) carries her six year-old (Kwon Eun-sung) up several flights of their Seoul high-rise. They swim through rapidly rising waters, duck tidal waves, elbow past and around the shocked and the concerned but not panicked and the faithful re-assuring each other that the disaster around them is “God’s will.” She’s been singing along with undisciplined and on-the-spectrum-needy Ja-in as she tries to hide the terror in her eyes.
But that security guy (Park Hae-soo) from her workplace who called? The one looking for her so that she can be helicoptered off the roof? He doesn’t sentimentalize, soft-sell, sugar-coat or break-it-to-her gently.
“Humanity is doomed.”
Dogged determination in the face of hopelessness is the byword in writer-director Kim Byung-woo’s thriller, which is meant to be an action essay in the core compassion of humanity. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” may suit the mood this film sets. But keeping calm and carrying on is a hard ethos to shake when the stakes are this high.
In cinematic short hand, “Great Flood” is a riff on Korea’s Oscar contender of a few year’s back, “Concrete Utopia,” mashed-up with the Tom Cruise-dies-again-and-again thriller “Edge of Tomorrow,” set in a present day end times of “2012.”
There are “Titanic” moments in the rising waters in confined spaces, the floating corpses and terror of those swept away, and grace notes of an elderly couple facing the end together.
But our writer-director (“The Terror Live” was his) pushes sentiment aside time and again, often to the film’s detriment. Because this disaster movie with a sci-fi subtext is about racing to make AI work as a means of humanity’s survival.
Our mother figure, Dr. Gu, has been researching, hard-wiring and programming the Emotion Engine. She doesn’t quite have it cracked, but in this “Edge of Tomorrow/Matrix” doomsday, she might break through as she tries thousands of ways to live this doomsday differently.
Will she save herself or not, save this child or others or not, help neighbors or not, fend off murderous looters rather than simply fleeing?
This cynical, unemotional, “just following orders” security guy will hinder, help, criticize and judge her efforts to cycle through every possible scenario, like the computer in “War Games” which has to try every version of tic-tac-toe to figure out if winning a nuclear war is possible. Her T-shirt changes numbers on its logo with every iteration she tries.
For all its stunning visuals — large scale disaster, vivid underwater survival scenes and grim flashbacks to a trauma from Dr. Gu and the child’s past — “The Great Flood” never crosses the threshold from watchable to relatable, a movie with characters we can identify with and an end goal that gives anybody hope.
The plot and performances are dispassionately rational to a fault. Kim might as well have made ‘We have to SAVE bit coin!” the big payoff.
That may just be a Western perspective on Eastern views of civilization, humanity and time. Or maybe I’m just not into “bleak” in humanity’s current timeline. But Kim creates an intentional emotional distance with his characters by dehumanizing them.
Odd moving moment aside, “Great Flood” is “Planet of the Apes” with a digital “Damn you all to hell” finality, “Titanic” without a Jack and Rose to root for, without Celine singing us into enduring the unendurable.
If the human heart can’t “go on,” what the hell’s the point?
Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity
Cast: Kim Da-mi, Park Hae-soo and Kwon Eun-sung
Credits: Directed by Kim Byung-woo, scripted by Kim Byung-woo with Moises Velasco. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:48
