The Battleship Island has English subtitles, and English dubbing for those unwilling to read while watching a movie. If you decide to watch this film, don’t just play the movie, but go to setup to make sure that you get the viewing experience that you want. The film takes place from November 1944 through August 9, 1945 in Korea and Japan when the Japanese were the colonial overlords who had exploited the Korean people long before World War II, which I knew before watching this movie. It predominantly unfolds on Hashima Island, which is more commonly known as The Battleship Island and was owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation until 2002, (but that detail is never explicitly referenced in the film). Korean people, including children, were enslaved and forced to work at a coal mine located on that island during the war. Korean women and young girls were not forced to work in the mines, but were raped and called comfort women.
I had planned to watch The Battleship Island when it was released in one Boston theater during August 2017, but there were not that many showings, and its release coincided with one of the few weekends that I was going out of town to so I had to wait until the DVD became available on Netflix. I usually watch art house South Korean films by directors such as Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho, but I have seen more mainstream, popular South Korean films. I even watch the occasional South Korean television show. I generally like South Korean media, but I found it difficult to follow this movie.
When I was younger, there were a lot more sweeping historical dramas about well known events starring Hollywood stars so even if you didn’t understand what was going on, the actor provided a short hand of what kind of person this was and how you should feel in this situation. These movies usually have to squeeze in a lot of material (location changes, time shifts) in a short amount of time even if it was a miniseries. I am more familiar with the European than the Pacific Ocean theater during World War II, and I began to notice while watching The King’s Choice, a Norwegian film, that it was still harder to follow rapid location changes, noted time shifts and change in character focus because it involved unfamiliar places, names and language. I thought that the font was to blame, but simply the shift in language from English to Norwegian, which has longer words and letters adjacent to each other to form words that I am unaccustomed to seeing clustered together was enough to disorient me and make it harder to follow the story.
I experienced these same problems with The Battleship Island, and I think that it is because I’m an American ignorant of the location and the basic story. I could not get fully absorbed in the story because I was not familiar enough with the cast to figure out whom I should consider a main character. The characters that I am supposed to be relating to are also disoriented because they are plunged into an unfamiliar world of suffering. I could not discern a rhythm to the pacing of events in the film. There is a disaster in the mine that initially seems grave and felt like it would take a long time to solve, but they are soon out and about. There is a gangster played by a hot actor who is clearly supposed to be noble, but I don’t get why other than the writer thought that the gangster was really a good guy, especially since when we are initially introduced to him, he is hitting everyone, including a woman. He makes up for it later, but I could not discern any narrative signals for this character development other than the hottest actor should have a vague romance with the hottest woman in the movie. There is no translation of the handwritten tattoo on one person’s body. In such a serious movie, it felt jarring when the movie shifted to comedic moments. I could have possibly misread the emotional tone of the scenes. This movie wants to cover a lot of ground and archetypal characters (the black market salesman, the spy, the collaborator), but there seemed to be a dissonance between ambition and execution. I generally prefer to have a dramatic rendering of actual historical figures versus general fiction characters used to convey actual historical events, but if those specific personal accounts are unavailable, the story still needs to be told no matter how imperfect.
Even in my confusion, I still found the denouement of the movie quite moving and cathartic considering the enormous landscape of impersonal and gleeful infliction of suffering. The Battleship Island is at its strongest when it becomes a story of how different types of Koreans came together to rise up against colonial exploitation and become a strong nation. Audiences may come to bear witness to the Korean people’s suffering, but what makes you stay is the triumphant victory against all odds, including self-hate and degradation after years of Japanese telling them that and treating them as if they are inferior. It may be propaganda complete with one-dimensional Japanese sadistic leaders, but every one loves to root for an underdog, and if you don’t want to be depicted as sadistic, don’t be sadistic.
The Battleship Island is not a bad movie, but I have no idea what the actual quality of the film is. I am glad that a movie about this story exists, but I think that there is a lot of room for improvement. I think that emotionally it ultimately works because even with my lack of understanding, I definitely empathized with the characters in the movie and was outraged by the Japanese and Korean collaborators’ treatment of them. The Battleship Island works as a fantasy of unity and independence against colonialism even if it is heavy-handed. I don’t think that movies have to pull punches and evoke nuance when depicting colonialists until those that benefitted from colonialism are willing to apologize and at least comply with agreed United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage Committee policies to acknowledge the atrocities committed on Hashima Island. Why does Hashima Island still have World Heritage status if Japan did not comply with policies that it agreed to implement? It is literally the least that they can do. If Japan and the Committee do not care, then I don’t think that a single South Korean filmmaker has to care about their feelings. Stay mad!