At the moment, who is the most popular Korean actor among the audience? I'm afraid that many people will nominate Ma Dongxi, a "cute man" with a sense of security.
Ma Dongxi's acting career, the "Crime City" series of "One Punch Gives People Like a Dreamland" has established his rare style and unique position in the Asian film industry.
At the beginning of 2024, his fist will work again, starting with a popular new film on Netflix.
"Wilderness"
The cost of the film is about 18 million US dollars (about 130 million yuan), and after it was launched, it scored 6.0 on IMDb, failed the domestic rating, and the word-of-mouth was a bit difficult to evaluate.
When you see the word "Ma Dongxi", you can basically imagine the style of the film, but the magic of Ma Dongxi is that your hand will uncontrollably click on his new action film.
Concrete utopian "famine"
"Wilderness" director Heo Myung-hang is a veteran martial arts instructor in the Korean film industry, and he has served as an action stunt instructor for films such as "New World", "Yellow Sea", and "D.P: Deserter Hunting".
He is similar to Ma Dongxi, and has previously collaborated with Ma Dongxi in many movies such as "Train to Busan", "Walking with God 2: Cause and Fate", "Crime City" and so on.
"Wilderness" is Xu Mingxing's directorial debut after 24 years in the industry.
His next directorial work is "Crime City 4", which will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival next month, which shows that he and Ma Dongxi have been deeply bound.
In addition to Ma Dongxi, the cast also includes the powerful Lee Hee-jun, who starred in the Korean drama "Snooping", the 97-year-old actor Lee Jun-young, who attracted attention with the movie "Lifting the Ban on Men and Women", and post-00s actress Lu Zhengyi ("Girl's World"), etc.
The plot of the film is simple and crude.
Three years after a massive earthquake that left Seoul in ruins, survivors have gone their separate ways to establish relatively stable settlements in different locations.
Namsan (played by Ma Dongxi) and 18-year-old boy Zhiguan, girl Xiuna and others live in and near the bus area, but suddenly a group of people claiming to be from the "Seoul Security Center" appears.
In order to keep humanity going, they have to take Xiuna to live in a safe place.
In fact, there are many doubts here-do these people have identity certificates? Zhiguan and Xiuna are both 18 years old, why do they only take Xiuna on the grounds of blood?
But as a sensually stimulating film, the main creator didn't care about logic at all, so Nanshan generously let him go and let a stranger pick up Xiuna.
Soon, at the scene where Nanshan and Zhiguan broke through the safety station and killed the elderly, the two realized that something was wrong and decided to go to the Seoul Security Station to rescue people with Li Enhu, a special forces sergeant of the Air Force who appeared halfway.
The safety station is an apartment building that stands tall in the rubble of the earthquake.
This building is the one in South Korea's Olympic bid film "Concrete Utopia", and the building number is exactly the same: 1-6 103 7-10.
《荒野》&《混凝土乌托邦》
It would be a big mistake to think that this is a Korean film that is lazy and uses the same setting without changing the number, because "Wilderness" and "Concrete Utopia" are truly "related".
Both films are based on the original work by Korean cartoonist Kim Chong-nyeong and share a post-apocalyptic worldview of the Seoul earthquake.
"Concrete Utopia" takes place in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, and the violent clashes at the climax of the film leave apartment buildings unled.
Three years later, "Wilderness" came, and a man who looked a lot like Lee Byung-hun entered the apartment and began human experiments and took control of the entire building.
Therefore, "Wilderness" is actually "Concrete Utopia 2", and the apartment in the film is like a curse and falls into the "Lee Byung-hun whirlpool".
In this whirlpool, Ma Dongxi began to "kill".
Ma Dongxi began to use guns
"Wilderness" is a hodgepodge of films, and in addition to "Concrete Utopia", there are many other films in the film.
In the sandy apocalypse, everyone is fighting for water, which is in line with the setting of Mad Max 4: Fury Road, and the film even shows the apocalyptic wasteland style and the "rudimentary version of the Fury Road" vehicle.
Ma Dongxi sells cuteness from time to time in the film, creates humorous memes through homophony, and he is urged to marry by everyone, all of which are inspired by the "Crime City" series.
For example, the villain asked Ma Dongxi, "Are you the hunter", Ma Dongxi replied, "Otherwise, is it 'tiring'", and the villain directly concluded "It's really humorous".
This dialogue is an imitation of the "old tradition" in the "Crime City" series - Ma Dongxi will joke with each other before the 1V1 decisive battle with the ultimate villain.
"Crime City"
As for the "zombies" featured in the early stage of the film, it is actually not very accurate.
In the film, the villain Dr. Liang Ki-so transforms the Air Force special forces members into combat monsters who rely on injections to maintain their lives by changing the body's metabolic system.
These people can think and communicate, but they are sluggish in pain and must be decapitated to eliminate them, and can be seen as a form between zombies and cyborgs.
In fact, there are only a few standard zombie-themed works in South Korea, such as "Train to Busan" and "Kingdom", but since Korean film and television have been deeply bound to American distributors, "zombies" have become a common promotional element of Korean films with doomsday and disaster themes.
In "Sweet Home", "Monster in Beijing" and the recent "Train to Busan" director's new work "The Secret of Bequest", strictly speaking, there are no zombie elements, and the terrifying power in it is only a mutation based on the human body or ethics.
"Kyojo Monster"
However, for "Wilderness", none of this is important, what matters is Ma Dongxi's action scenes.
Compared with "Crime City", the action scenes in "Wilderness" are less choreographed and more "straightforward", but its gradual escalation trend is also more obvious.
At the beginning of the film, Ma Dongxi slaughtered the head of a ferocious crocodile with a machete, giving the audience a little shock.
After that, Ma Dongxi punched one by one in the bus area, teaching the gangs who came to provoke and rob, and he made the gangsters line up in the hot spring garden and knocked them out in turn, which followed the character of "One Punch Man" in "Crime City".
When he arrived at the apartment building, Ma Dongxi contributed a number of action-packed action scenes such as gun fights in the basement corridor, slashing with big knives, and decisive battles in the corridors.
You read that right, Ma Dongxi started using guns.
But this does not affect its thousand-handed, sharp fighting style, with severed arms and heads, and the picture of blood and plasma soaring, which is also very charming as a B-grade film and a cult film.
The future of "cute men".
Ma Dongxi won the Best Supporting Actor Award in the film category at the Baeksang Arts Awards in 2013 for the thriller "Neighbors", but it is obviously impossible for him to take the acting route.
As an action movie actor, he is also unlikely to follow the route of Donnie Yen, Tony Jia (Thailand, "Boxer"), Iko Uace (Indonesia, "Raid") and others.
Because in contrast, this kind of action actor is more inclined to fine action movies, and the action design is more detailed, twisty, precise, and full of dense beauty of constant tricks.
"Thrust"
Ma Dongxi's target may be Swarzenegger, Stallone, Dwayne Johnson, and other action superstars who "make the final decision" and rely on the strength of blocks and individual actions to walk the rivers and lakes.
This can be seen from Ma Dongxi's future proposed works.
It is reported that he will star in the "giant" action series "Wormhole", which is based on the original work of Korean cartoonist Kim Gyu-sen, which has a bit of Dwayne Johnson's "Berserk Behemoth".
In addition, he may work with Stallone to film and produce the American version of "The Legend of the Wicked".
The Legend of the Wicked
It can be seen that Ma Dongxi will further strengthen his image as a tough guy in South Korea and Hollywood.
His authentic "cuteness" outside the play distinguishes him from tough guys with more prominent masculinity in past eras, such as Swarzenegger, giving him a trait that conforms to gender trends.
In "Wilderness", Ma Dongxi has repeatedly shown a shy or innocent demeanor through his expressions, lines, actions, etc., which is unimaginable for Hollywood veteran tough guys.
From this point of view, although the quality of "Wilderness" is not good, it is still very suitable as a slice to observe the actor Ma Dongxi.
From "Wilderness", we can also see a little bit of the future trend of Korean film and television, that is, creators are increasingly obsessed with themes such as the end of the world, disasters, and mutations.
This is actually a manifestation of the anxiety in Korean society.
On the one hand, this kind of subject matter directly places people in extreme environments, providing a fairly intuitive imaginary reference for young people to see the future.
On the other hand, horror content with a streamlined volume allows the audience to achieve a short-term escape from the world in a highly compressed sensual pleasure.
In recent years, Korean filmmakers have frequently ventured into the field of science fiction ("Concrete Utopia" and "Wilderness" are also science fiction films in the broad sense), and there is also a reason for this, as it seems that as long as you leave your toes off the present or the earth, anxiety can also disappear.
However, this trend of creation and movie-watching is not healthy.
Because the essence of imagination is not to escape, but to create, and only by grounding it in reality can life avoid becoming a wilderness.
Author: County Hao