Moon: True Blue, Not True

As of March 2024, South Korea has yet to send a spaceship to the moon but given that other countires have — the U.S., China, Russia, Israel, and India — I don't know if I'd classify Moon as science fiction so much as a speculative drama. In short... What if Korea sent three men in a rocket intended for a lunar landing but then it exploded? Then what if history repeated itself again, except the second time one (Do Kyung-soo) of the astronauts was the son of one of the old ones? As an added twist, you could always have the primary advisor (Sol Kyung-gu) be associated with the earlier disaster, too.

Director-writer Kim Yong-hwa doesn't stop there either. For drama, he adds meteor storms, a moonquake, an unhelpful, unsympathetic clique at NASA, and an arty bloody nose in which red globules float around the space capsule, gravity-free. The dialogue is largely descriptive: the astronauts describe what's happening as we see it; the space team on earth describes what they're seeing; the news reporters describe what's just happened. A Korean-American administrator may emerge as the closest thing this movie has to a hero; the white guys are definitely the enemies. It's hard to like people who have to be told, "Forget his nationality for now!"