Movie: Horror Live
Genre: Crime, suspense
Director: Kim Byung-woo
Starring: Ha Jeong-woo, Lee Kyung-young, Lee David
Release Date: July 31, 2013 (South Korea)
Awards: Best Newcomer Director Award at the 34th (2013) Korean Film Blue Dragon Awards
The Korean movie "Horror Live" is a very wonderful crime suspense film, the atmosphere and rhythm of the film are quite good, and the topics discussed are also very deep and complex. It tells the story of radio anchor Yoon Young-hwa, who was on the show when he suddenly received a call from an unidentified audience claiming to detonate the Mapo Bridge on the Han River. Yin Ronghua didn't care at first, who knew that he immediately witnessed the explosion of the Mapo Bridge. In order to return to the position of TV news anchor, he did not call the police at the first time but chose to carry out crazy live coverage of the serial bomb attack.
During the live broadcast, Yin Ronghua was under pressure from all sides, and all parties also pushed him into a situation of no return. He even wants to gamble his life and reputation, circling between all sides, who is the attacker behind the scenes? How can I rescue hostages to avoid more explosions? How exactly does Yin Ronghua have to choose to escape smoothly? What is most important in human nature? Yin Ronghua needs to constantly make choices.
The film cuts directly to the theme at the beginning, and a few lines create the image of a frustrated former news anchor. The camera movement is very good, the moving camera position and the shaking camera create an extremely panicked and tense atmosphere, highlighting the documentary sense of the event, coping with the main content of the story, "horror live", and continuing this atmosphere until the end. As the incident unfolds, more and more people are involved, politicians, businesses, the media, society, citizens and the attackers hidden behind, and their true purposes are revealed.
After the terrorist attack began, the contradictions between the parties gradually intensified: the attacker behind the scenes, Park Lugui, claimed to be a construction worker involved in the construction of the Mapo Bridge, and demanded huge compensation and a presidential apology for the 3 dead workers and himself; the once-beautiful host Yin Ronghua tried to turn around with the live broadcast of the terrorist attacker, with a bomb in the headset hanging in the line, swinging left and right in human nature and selfish desires; the TV station director and Yin Ronghua reached a conditional exchange to achieve a ratings increase at all costs The authority system has been unable to take swift and effective decisive action, and the development of the situation has gradually gotten out of control.
Among the many contradictions, the key point that makes the situation out of control is that the vulnerable groups in the general sense are suddenly transformed into the dominant party, occupying God's perspective, arbitrarily planning explosions, and pervasive. They also grasped the "secrets" of many important people who generally occupy a dominant position in society, such as corruption and bribery, and inconsistencies, which firmly restrained the development of the situation and put the public interest in danger.
In a deeper sense, after the intensification of the contradiction, the explosion disrupted public safety, the authority system was challenged, the traditional image collapsed, and the negative information directly undermined the public order at the psychological level, which was more psychologically destructive than imagined and could be inherited from generation to generation. Therefore, the scale of the topic discussed in "Horror Live" is very large, but it ultimately attributes the traction of the direction of the event to Yin Ronghua personally, avoiding excessive discussion.
Because Yin Ronghua is a media person who hosts a popular news program, the attackers behind the scenes call him out of trust, forcing the president to come out and apologize to many people who have worked hard all their lives at the bottom of society but earned everything.
What position should Yin Ronghua insist on? At first, Yin Ronghua just wanted to grab the headlines to restore his anchor position, and later, the suspect behind the scenes constantly put pressure to blow up the female news anchor who succeeded him, and then carried out a second explosion at the Mapo Bridge, forcing him to say the same sentence at the end of each news broadcast: "Today's news ends here, always stand in the position of the vulnerable groups, and spread fair and just news for everyone." Yin Ronghua's psychology in the focus of the contradiction is constantly wavering, what should he do to end the incident and save his life? However, he found that no one could really save himself, that he was no different from the hostages on the Mapo Bridge, that these perpetrators could hide behind the scenes or stand in front of the stage, the director betrayed him, the authorities delayed him, the attackers behind the scenes threatened him, and he could be sacrificed at any time.
At the same time, on behalf of the media, the tv station director is trying to shape the "justice" and "evil" in public opinion, and here there is an intriguing glue point: saving people does not seem to be the first, and it is the most important to clarify who is the righteous side and who is the evil party, because ordinary people can only be rescued by the righteous side. Neither the attackers behind the scenes nor either side of the authority system will easily compromise, so more and more innocent people will be sacrificed, until the situation is clear that these debts are counted on one side, and then the other side will "win".
As the director of the National Police Agency, who was blown up by the attackers, said on the livestream: "Including Yoon Young-hwa, who in the Republic of Korea is clean?" Despite this, many vested interests in the center of the storm are still eating "human blood steamed buns" in the face of threats to their lives, and for their own interests, Yin Ronghua is on the line of life and death and discredited. It is not difficult to see why the attackers behind the scenes have come to this step, how their legitimate interests have been trampled away at that time are the same as what Yin Ronghua has suffered today, and the same as the innocent citizens on the Mapo Bridge, is it precisely because no one is really clean, and the big evil and the small evil can be quantitatively compared, so they can be sacrificed?
When great contradictions and conflicts occur, human nature, morality, privacy, and interests are greatly tested, and everyone's choices are different, and it is these different choices that make the incident more and more complicated, and no one is really solving the problem, but creating more problems. Blowing up bridges, blowing up people, blowing up buildings, more and more people are dying, in order to calm the incident Yin Ronghua actually has to be offered as a scapegoat for the whole incident.
Yin Ronghua is just an ordinary person, like the attackers behind the scenes, they are puppets manipulated in different fields, the two characters are each other, and they both fall into despair before dying, and suffer a similar ending. The attackers behind the scenes did not find a real way to make their voices heard, did not make a reasonable note of the hard work of their social group for a lifetime, but paid a heavy price for their own excesses. Yin Ronghua was used, used, and reused by all parties, and after the death of his lover, he was devastated, and finally made the final choice from his own position, taking over the detonator of the attacker behind the scenes, in fact, no matter how to choose him, there is only one way.
Someone has to come out to atone for their sins, for those who die, but violence is never the best solution.