Review of Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004) by Chris N — 18 Jan 2009

This is the story of two devoted brothers who are press ganged into the South Korean army to fight the northern Communists during the Korean (civil) war. As time goes by, the older of the two brothers becomes corrupted by continuous fighting and his passionate desire to fulfil his promise to his mother to protect his younger brother, which weighs heavily on his mind.

He fights so hard he becomes a hero for his unit in the hope his exceptional devotion will win his brother the right to quit the army and return home. But as time goes by, he becomes brutal and begins to see the northerners as sub-human and virtually loses his mind.

Eventually, all he knows is how to fight but he doesn't know who or what he is fighting for, and as a consequence he becomes estranged from his younger brother who no longer can respect him. But then following an event when he thinks his brother has been killed by his own side, he defects to the north and becomes a propaganda icon for the righteousness of the northern cause, leading one of their elite units against the south.

Throughout, both brothers are driven on and subject to events beyond their control. Their pain and the suffering inflicted on their family is allegorical of the rift and suffering of the two halves of the country, rent apart by superpower politics, each side supposedly warring to save the other from their fate: one from communism, the other from capitalism.

The issues explored here are particular to Korea but the tragedy of war is totally familiar. Throughout, the film elicits a strong and increasingly unbearable empathy and desire for reunification from the audience who feel equally for both brothers, and this is its emotional and moral force.

The possibility for reunification of the family torn apart, and by extension the whole Korean people, is ultimately presented via the surviving son's granddaughter who, years later is keen to know of the fate of her great uncle whom she has obviously never met, still missing in action since the war's end to the present day, and still much beloved by her grandfather, who harbours a sense of great loss and guilt that he could not save his older brother when last they met on the battlefield.

A powerful story.