The best monster movie ever? I seriously doubt that making such a claim would be false. Why? I plan to tell you. First of all, Gwoemul propably had the best plot I have ever seen in a movie of this genre. It all starts off seeming like some cliched Godzilla-copy, but the moment we meet our so-called main character, Kan-Du, his occasional dialogue and overall attitude prepare us for something different. The moment the army arrives, everything truly starts. The plot unfolds into social and political commentary, different than usual character development, extraordinarily well coreographed action, and it's all covered in weird, sweet sense of humour that I'm pretty sure that any possible remakes will be unsuccesfull in copying, due to it's unique qualities. Also, this movie made something not all that many succeed in nowadays: I actually cared about the characters. I didn't really notice it until one of the main characters got killed. I felt like watching Balthazar Getty's character die in the last season of Alias, I mean I just realised that I didn't want the rest of the cast die. I also loved how little the monster was actually shown in the movie. Usually the monster is nearly the star, but here it was just used to give us something deeper and more meaningful.
When it came to acting, this movie delivered and even gave us a free slice of damn good pie ontop of that! The man who played the grandfather did an excellent job in portraying a man who felt as if he needed to save all his children, and redeem himself a place in heaven. Also, Kang-Ho Song was spectacular in the main role, giving a truly memorable portrayal of what people will be willing to do for someone they love and take care of. Bong did a smashing job at the directing, bringing us an extremely realistic tale of what would truly happen in case a monster of such kind would ever emerge. Then, one of the things that are usually important for monster movies. The creature itself. It was apparently entirely created using CGI, but I'll be damned if someone is actually capable of seeing that. That has got to be some of the most impressive computer animation I've ever seen. The few action scenes that we saw the monster in worked wonderfully, and were highly more intense than in most other movies of this kind.
But, you can't have a movie that just has good qualities. There's always something wrong. In this movie's case there aren't many, but one of the nads I have for this movie was definately it's incapability to actually put the humour into the scenes that would've actually needed them (except for the funeral scene, which worked awesomely). The humour worked, but it was somewhat loose from the story on occasion. Then, the final fight of the movie was abit streched, I mean the monster should've died atleast 20 times during the beating that it received. Then there were some slightly illogical things (for example in one of the key scenes of the movie, the main character receives brain surgery of somekind that supposedly removes part of his brain, but that sure didn't affect him whatsoever), but I can let them slide for now. Are those little problems enough for me to call this movie something that deserves less than my recommendation? Not in my opinion.
