Steel Rain 2: Summit: Negotiating

One unforeseen legacy of the international disgrace Donald Trump's four years in the White House may be how American presidents are portrayed in foreign films in the near future: In the Cold War drama Steel Rain 2: Summit (2020), for instance, scruffy U.S. President Smoot (Angus Macfadyen) comes across as a not-too-bright blowhard who makes — and tweets! — inappropriate remarks that serve no objective but hiw own self-aggrandizement. Compare him with South Korean President Han (Jung Woo-sung), a squeaky-clean, fawning career diplomat who's like the one dolphin swimming in a pool of sharks. Or North Korea's Chairman (Yoo Yeon-seok) who's grounded by a heartless determination exacerbated by anger issues. Each man has his limitations and his faults but only one comes across as a moron. "USA! USA!"

Not that Yang Woo-seok's political thriller is a sophisticatedly satirical cat-and-mouse game. Characters wear flag pins to remind you who's representing which country; history is explained as if the writing team were periodically mandated by an in-house Korean War scholar to drop data points. As for the central drama, it's strictly Tom Clancy hyperbole when a rogue general (Kwok Do-won) from Pyongyang takes takes our three world leaders for a bank-making submarine ride. Whee! Ka-ching! My final takeaways: The evils of capitalism are now recognized as a global problem; greed continues to be the ugliest of sins; nuclear war remains an option for our worst politicians; the American myth somehow survives despite the staggering pile of evidence to the contrary. One question: Is the movie's temporary Commander-in-Chief (Kristen Dalton) stateside modeled after a hawkish Hilary Clinton?

Steel Rain: Enemies With Integrity

One element that continually catches me offguard in South Korean movies involving North Korean spies is how often the neighbors to the North are portrayed not as "bad guys" so much as people of integrity fighting for the wrong side. There's a respect accorded to the soldiers from Pyongyang, an acknowledgment that these self-sacrificing communists can't be seduced by an amoral capitalism of fast food and fast fashion. To their Seoul brothers, these patriotic brethren are basically wayward kin (unknowingly) awaiting reunification, a notion that runs counter to the more typical "us versus them" narratives you usually encounter in (cold) war movies. Yes, nukes are involved!

In Yang Woo-suk's Steel Rain, the agent/bodyguard/martial-arts-expert Eom Chul-woo (Jung Woo-sung) is better looking, stronger, nobler, and even more sentimental than his South Korean counterpart (Kwak Do-won), a self-assured, perhaps duplicitous political beast who's more cagey than cage-match. But those attributes don't necessarily guarantee our well-intention warrior victory because he's pitted against American and Japanese forces as well as his own country's traitorous military insiders. I never found myself exactly routing for Eom, despite his cancer diagnosis and inhuman perservence. But I did feel bad for how much the cards were stacked against him.