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.
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