The Battleship Island

Technically accomplished, narratively impoverished.

While Battleship Island is sometimes unpleasant to watch, it is a consistently involving, atypically thoughtful crowd-pleaser.

Though Mr. Ryoo's taste for heightened theatricality threatens his story's credibility at times, there is no denying his skill with a large-scale action set piece.

It's when the various threads converge that the mechanical nature of the plotting and the thinness of the characterizations are thrown into sharpest relief.

Undermined by melodramatic and manipulative plotting, it's nevertheless an above-average Korean blockbuster, benefitting from a top drawer cast and grand sets and set pieces

Don't mistake The Battleship Island for mere torture porn about how the Japanese Empire was bad.

The Battleship Island liberally fictionalizes a real (and horrific) WWII event to rewrite history into a much more satisfying outcome.

The characters are drawn in broad strokes... Yet with Ryoo giving the action a Spielbergian sweep as the action builds towards the climactic prison break, you'll find yourselves rooting for them all the same.

... I enjoyed the touching performance of the father-daughter duo, and Battleship Island will undoubtedly attract hordes of Song fans who want to see their idol don a military uniform again after Descendants Of The Sun.

There is more than one way to approach wartime movies, as the recent box-office successes of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk and Ryoo Seung Wan's The Battleship Island prove.