The director of R-Point has stated clearly that this was an attempt to create an anti-war movie. Now, I have no problems with anti-war movies, in fact I like them, Oliver Stone’s Vietnam epic Platoon is amongst one of my favourites. Kong Su-chang also stated that he wanted to make a horror film. Does anti-war and horror go hand in hand?
Horror films are intent on scaring the jeebus out of you. They, like all genres which suggest or display violence, death and fear, can work well with any personal message that is intended. The director of R-Point, however, seems to have veered over to the side of horror, rather than anti-war.
R-Point is based on a myth that was created during the Vietnam War. There was an actual R-Point and it seemed to function in much the same way that the infamous Bermuda Triangle does: whatever goes in, never comes back out. Now, if you’re into myths and legends, then the story will intrigue you, as many during the Vietnam War went missing in the region noted as R-Point.
In the film, the premise is based on the myth, and so soldiers are sent into R-Point in order to recover said missing soldiers. The whole thing begins when a radio transmission is received from the last known location of the missing troop, and so a new team is sent in to investigate and recover evidence of the radio controller’s existence.
So far, it sounds fine, but things start to take a Hollywood turn, and everything ends up looking and sounding like an 80s Hollywood blockbuster horror-cum-action film. At times I waited for Schwarzenegger to jump out and firing rockets in an aimless direction and causing carnage the scale you’d see an entire country cause with a full army.
With a team lead by a military mole (cliché 1) and the lone wolf who’s rumoured to be psychotic (cliché 2), the orders are given by a man wearing thick, 80s styled sun glasses (cliché 3), which are authentic for the time I guess ) George Peppard would be proud); a scarf, a big woolly jumper thing in a room where there isn’t much in the way of light, and there are oscillating fans circling above. May be he had a cold. I don’t know. But it’s hard to ignore the repetition of previous films being echoed.
The rest of the team is a the usual rag tag bunch. You have the rookie trying to prove himself; the toughest of the weak who tries to order people about, when in fact he’s the one who loses his bowel movements faster than anyone else; you have the one who keeps saying “Something’s not right” every 10 minutes (an exaggeration, but you’ll see) and you start to get the picture about how original the script is becoming.
Now, the first half of the film is actually not bad. There’s a very nice twist in the middle of R-Point that they really should, and perhaps could, have continued. It worked so well I didn’t notice it until they pointed it out. They happened to make such a point of the fact, that it takes up about 20 minutes of the film as everyone then slowly forgets it happened. So what was the point in having it anyway? Still it was a really good twist. In fact, there are several instances that twists occur, that work very well. But they’re instances rather than being drawn out, so there’s little in the way of suspense.
Any anti-war message you attribute to the film will be lost, as you do become a touch engaged with what’s going on. There are ghostly happenings, but an apparitions are few and far between; this, for me, is a very good thing. There’s nothing freakish or scary about what takes place, in fact, I’ve been scared more by step-brother’s ability to eat as much as he does, than anything that took place in R-Point, however, that’s not to say I didn’t appreciate what the director was trying to do.
It also reminds me of a film, called The Bunker. It’s a British film with a story revolving around ghosts living in a bunker the British need to use in order to attack the Nazis, or something to that affect. I only watched the first five minutes and laughed hysterically, and then almost immediately almost fell asleep. I went home, but my friend watched it; I have it on good authority that I should watch it and waste 90 minutes of my life too, just as he did. The Bunker came out a good few years ago, so, just how original is R-Point? It’s fair to say that originality is not the film’s strong point anyway, so it wouldn’t surprise me if influence was directed in the Korean winds.
Besides the existence of a film that’s almost exactly the same, there is little that R-Point does that hasn’t been done before and done better. It doesn’t work well as an Anti-War film; I would say it bombs in that department (no pun intended). As a horror, it drags, and disappoints too. Neither building tension, nor managing to suggest or create anything horrific. It’s all rather dry and reserved, with no ideas or tension being brought in. As stated, there instances where the film shines with ingenuity, but we’re talking small moments.
How the film ends is also predictable. You figure it out, once the brown stuff hits the fan, and things are quite right. Sadly, it ends just as you predict, and so you feel gutted that you didn’t get something out of it. What shocks is that for part of the film, it did some interesting things, but then it decided to go all Hollywood and ruin any chance of being a half decent film.
Although the acting isn’t great, there are good examples of existing clichés of war films; so in that sense, they’ve done well, but it’s not really what a viewer wants to see. The cinematography fares no better; one large landscape shot, and the inside of a mansion; rinse and repeat until it starts to annoy the viewer. It all becomes very tiring, very quickly; add the mix of unoriginal scenes in the night time, and you have a wonderful mix of boredom.
R-Point has some merit, but not enough to justify viewing. Sometimes I wonder why I bother writing reviews, because writing about the bad films has no joy. I would love to have every movie I see stimulate my mind and give me something positive to say about it. R-Point is not one of those movies, and certainly a missed opportunity.
Verdict: Half decent beginning, but runs out of ideas very quickly. Everything else is simply disappointing