Sunday, July 26, 2009

Taegukgi (Brotherhood)

I finally got to a film on my original list. The movie entitled Tageguki. This was an AMAZING movie! I am already a tremendous fan of historical war movies and this film allowed me to view the Korean War through the eyes of South Korean soldiers. This film depicts the horrors of war, how it tears families apart and how war changes people as seen with the transformation of Jin-tae Lee. It also shows the sacrifices families often make for one another and the strong bond shared by brothers.


"In 1950, in South Korea, the shoe-shiner Jin-tae Lee and his eighteen years old student brother Jin-seok Lee form a poor but happy family with their mother, Jin-tae's fiancé Young-shin Kim and her young sisters. Jin-tae and his mother are tough workers, who sacrifice themselves to send Jin-seok to the university. When North Korea invades the South, the family escapes to a relative's house in the country, but along their journey, Jin-seok is forced to join the army to fight in the front, and Jin-tae enlists too to protect his young brother. The commander promises Jin-tae that if he gets a medal he would release his brother, and Jin-tae becomes the braver soldier in the company. Along the bloody war between brothers, the relationship of Jin-seok with his older brother deteriorates leading to a dramatic and tragic end.

A group of Korean archeologists find a skeleton and identify it as Lee Jin-Seok. But Lee Jin-Seok is still alive and he is now an old man. It is his brother Jin-Tae who went missing in the Korean War. We travel from the present to 1950, when the Korean War started. Jin-Seok and Jin-Tae, Jin-Seok's brother, are young men who suddenly find themselves catapulted into a bloody world so different from their quiet, rural lives. As the war progresses, the war begins to poison Jin-Tae's mind. Jin-Seok is lost when he finds that he no longer knows who his brother is"

(via: IMDb)

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