Over 700 South Korean student soldiers who have only received combat training for 10 days are sent on a mission. They will try to divert the North Koreans, while the main operation takes place in a completely different place. How many of them will survive?
The Battle of Jangsari is the second movie in a trilogy. I haven’t seen the first movie, Operation Chromite, but I’ll do that in a few weeks. I just hope its better than The Battle of Jangsari, but I don’t have high hopes.
The Battle of Jangsari has a big problem, it doesn’t offer an engaging journey. I’ve seen several of these war movies from South Korea, and my favorite movie is Brotherhood of War. It has something that The Battle of Jangsari lacks, which are characters you care about and that you become more familiar with.
The characters in The Battle of Jangsari are just half-empty morons who are written poorly. And it gets worse when the movie offers a lot of drama towards the end of the movie when it tries to make the viewers shed some tears. Then you see the dark side of the South Korean rubbish drama that they have picked from the bottom shelf! The characters don’t deserve our tears, because they feel like movie characters and not real people!
The movie has three major battle scenes. The best battle scene is the scene in the tunnel. This is the movie’s major highlight. The other two battle scenes are not much to brag about. Especially the first battle scene tries to emulate the opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan. If that happened in reality, that doesn’t mean you should create it just like the amazing sequence in Saving Private Ryan. What you see in The Battle of Jangsari feels so cheap, and they should have thought of other solutions to make this work in a better way. This just felt lazy!
The Battle of Jangsari isn’t a good war movie. The movie has lousy characters that feels artifical. And seriously, what does Megan Fox do in a South Korean movie? She’s awful, but so is the whole script. So I can defend her! Which doesn’t feel right at all!