This is in my top 3 favourite films of all time. I've watched it countless times and of course I'll watch it again.

The plot is rather rudimentary. A bunch of people is chasing another bunch of people for two and a half hours.

But! Three things make those 2,5 h worth your time:

+ it's freaking beautiful. The photography is a piece of art. How to take dust, rags and ruins and make gorgeous pictures, that's the magic of cinema (yeah, Wong Kar-wai did it first in Ashes of Time, ok).

+ the action scenes. We get to see all sorts of battles, duels, skirmishes, many tactics, lots of blood (and lots of arrows through necks for some reason), and all of it is rather believable. No wire action here. The fighting is beautifully filmed (by someone who actually knows how to break the ''hold the camera steady when filming action'' rule) while managing to appear realistic.

+ all of this is nice, but this movie's great strength is the characters and the relationships between them. I don't want to make this review too long, so I'll just say this film has a great cast that brings to life every single character, down to the last random merchant.

I can't recommend this film enough.

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Not your average historical drama (no spoilers but maybe cw)

I do love sageuks. I hardly watch anything else. But I have this problem, see: there is a lot of classism. Their stories are always about princes and princesses and yangbans, and even if the main character is of a lower status they are almost always sure to be a child of a noble family that has been wrongly accused of treason etc etc etc. The actual low-status characters are often caricatures and comic relief. I find this problematic.

So dramas like Im Kkong Jung are a huge breath of fresh air to me.
This is as far from the silk-clothed, baby-faced, elegant jeune premiers as you can get. It's dusty, muddy, raw. There's straw and rags and unkempt hair and unwashed faces and people being horrible to each other. In fact, I don't think there's a worse drama to be a woman in, than this one (*).
The music is heavily based on Korean folk music, with folk singer Jang Sah Ik among others. It is very appropriate and enhances the watching experience.
... which is hard. I won't lie, this is at times a tough watch. Not only the material world is depicted with all its flaws and blemishes, but the humans in it as well. The heroes of this epic are horrible people. One of them literally murders babies. We certainly don't get a glamourized version of poverty. On the contrary, we get a naturalistic depiction of it.
A special mention to the direction. I adored the camera work. The angles, the movements, it was beautifully filmed.

I think I'll watch parts of it again. I can't watch all of it, mainly because of *see asterisk above. So much assault, rape, abuse, oh and that's just from the "good guys".

In short: if you want love stories with princes, this is not the one. If you want a good historical drama that is all about the Korean people who populated the history outside the palace and the fancy villas of the aristocracy, give this a go.

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The story of the whole world in one little film

What a pity that this film has not been acclaimed enough. It is in fact quite good.

On the surface, it is the story of two officers and a common soldier who barely manage to escape a slaughter of a battle and find shelter from a blizzard in an abandoned inn. There, they have to survive the cruel conditions, the Manchus and, above all, each other.

This simple plot is used to show us a couple of things about the human condition: will a common goal (survive and return to Joseon) and a common enemy on their tracks be enough for those three to overcome deep grudges and bad blood caused by class differences and injustice, both actual and perceived?
The derelict inn, itself the theatre of a previous violent act, becomes a petri dish where we can isolate and observe humanity struggling to cope in an extreme, inhospitable situation while handling its own boiling emotions.

And it is shown masterfully. The current story is bleak, dark, violent and bloody, almost cartoonishly so. The three characters' backstory is shown in short flashbacks full of intense colour, almost garish in comparison. The music and sound design in general enhances the experience beautifully.

I saw no flaws. This is one well-done film.

Just don't expect a nice, uplifting or sombre costume epic with heroism. It is grim, dirty and violent.

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