The Coast Guard (2002) User Reviews

It might work as a military documentary

[deng1506 · 6/10 · 17 July 2005]

Perhaps the reason why this movie is getting such a bad rap is mainly a fault of its well-meaning, but still incoherent style and narrative structure. I have not read any articles on this movie or interviews with the director to know what his overt intention was, but in the end I think the movie falls short of its mark due to Kim's perennial fixation on obsession, whether it was his intention to delve into this subject matter or not. On most levels, obsession is a largely private affair, and any exegesis of obsession enmeshed within the loaded geopolitical situation that is now Korea would require a broader vision and canvas matched with a technical command of story telling than any that Kim has been able to provide here or elsewhere. However, one thing that I must praise Kim for is the reality with which he portrays military life in South Korea. It is, in my view, the grittiest, down-to-other depiction on the silver-screen of life as a grunt doing mandatory military service in Korea. I should know, since I've done my two years' service, as no doubt Kim also has. The situation might be unreal (a loose-cannon grunt suddenly acquiring the killing skills of Jason Bourne) but the military's reaction to it certainly wasn't. The ineptitude of the commanders to stop the problem, the fear of the soldiers and the conflict it breeds within, and, most important of all, the corporal punishment that gets amplified as it spreads down the chain of command.

So here's my recommendation: if you want a well thought out movie which pits issues of personal obsession against major geopolitical themes of our day, this movie is not for you. If, however, you want to see a curiosity piece about how troglodytic an existence military conscripts lead in South Korea, then you've come to the right place.

Absurd korean movie. Think Calvin Klein ad meets Aliens, meets Rambo.

[Havan_IronOak · 5/10 · 25 May 2003]

When an overzealous Korean Coast Guard soldier kills a local civilian at night when the civilian is in a restricted area, the officials give him a seven-day pass and he begins his descent into madness. Coincidentally, it's about that time that the movie begins its descent into absurdity.

Also the girlfriend of the slain punk quickly becomes a Korean Ophelia with no real Hamlet.

I'm not sure of Korean military regulations but I've never seen so many superior officers slapping, punching and kicking their subordinates. Whenever the superiors are outraged they also take it out on the entire platoon by having them run in the sea (mostly shirtless) and roll around in the mud.

I'm not so sure that this was a movie as much as it was some paramilitary fetishists idea of a porno.

Kim ki-duk movie hard to conceive..!!

[kamalbeeee · 6/10 · 27 June 2021]

A south korean army men try to find a north korean spy who is never exists and one day he shoot one of the guy by mistake and his life became soo hard because of guilty..that death guy's girl friend became crazy and few army mens rape her.. Really dont knw what director tries to tell in this movie.. Really i dont understand even i watched movie expalnation... Better can watch for intelluctuals in movies..

Maverick South Korean author Kim Ki Duk depicts that life at an army base is no joke !

[FilmCriticLalitRao · 10/10 · 8 April 2010]

There is all possibility that "The Coast Guard" should be considered as an autobiographical tale.We all know that director Kim Ki Duk has never acknowledged this fact in media.As he has strongly depicted every facet of South Korean society,"Hae Anseon" must be hailed an offbeat film which gave him a once in a lifetime chance to depict South Korean military as he must have had witnessed disturbing events in the past. There is something unique about this film as its universal appeal makes audiences believe that whatever that has happened to South Korean soldiers might also happen to some other military men in some other country.Kim Ki Duk suggests that life at an army base is no joke.He has made good use of documentary style realism to draw a visceral portrayal of innocent,young military men whose job is to guard borders between North Korea and South Korea.Some scenes might be devoid of reality but it is hoped that they would be accepted by viewers despite their shortcomings as a film director needs some kind of artistic liberty. There are two major issues with this film.Common people have been shown in bad light.Some of the women audiences might also appear to be a tad apprehensive as their images have not been correctly depicted in this rather raw and violent film.

Dreadful

[hypersquared · 4/10 · 16 December 2003]

My attenton was captured by this description in the AFI Fest literature: "Director Kim Ki-Duk mixes a rough personal drama with a tense socio-critical allegory. The controversy surrounding the consequences of dividing the Korean peninsula is highlighted by surreal elements that drive home the insanity of a highly charged political atmosphere." Now there's a movie I want to see!

***MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW***

What it turned out to be is an ultra-violent melodrama by a director whose emotional development seems to have arrested at fifteen years of age. His premise isn't necessarily simple, but his handling of it is simplistic at best. The action centers around the shooting of a young man who crosses into the barricaded territory between North and South Korea to get it on with his girlfriend. The girlfriend and the soldier who did the shooting both go insane in a pair of the most superficial performances you're ever likely to see. No one involved here seems to have the slightest insight into what mental illness actually looks like.

Similarly, Kim's attempt to castigate the violent impulses of the military mindset (the literature makes the point that he's a former soldier himself) is played out in a seemingly endless chain of poorly staged melees between soldiers and civilians, soldiers and soldiers, maybe even civilians and civilians, but I can't remember because the movie at some point just became a big mush of stomping feet and flying fists. And oh yeah, there's that abortion scene, where, wouldn't you know it... the army surgeon doesn't have any anesthetic! Someone get me out of here...

Too sappy to be realist, too lacking in any style to succeed as metaphor, the film makes not one satisfying gesture in its interminable 95 minutes. I hope this'll be the worst film I see at the festival, and I have to say, chances are good.

Emotionally intense war drama

[skeeley-2 · 8/10 · 10 May 2005]

As the opening titles of the film remind us (or teach us, if your unfamiliar with North and South Korea), anyone entering South Korea's coastline after dark can be considered a spy and shot on sight. A Coast Guard Platoon monitors this beach lined with barb wire fencing. Kang is the main character, an ordinary private who takes his job way too seriously.

Without going into too much more, Kang does something that destroys the relationship between the local villagers and the platoon and slowly begins to go insane and unravel.

If you like Kim Ki-Duk's films, you'll love this one as well. The main character is a crazy violent guy ala Bad Guy, there's a crazy woman who ends up sleeping with everyone like Birdcage Inn; the love-hate relationship of villagers and military from Address Unknown and even Kim's disturbing predilection for evil things involving live fish ("The Isle").

What separates "Coast Guard" from his other films is how political the film is. American audiences can probably understand what it must be like to be an Iraqi or Afghani citizen now after seeing whats it like in Coast Guard when an army platoon is supplanted in your community and you have no choice. While we don't see the effects of the Korean War here in the US, we certainly understand.

Pointless and uninteresting

[Xiayu · 2/10 · 12 June 2006]

An incident that takes place at night in poor visibility and perpetrated by a rather over-enthusiastic soldier wreaks havoc on a local community. Mistaking a ground-level head that he sees in his night-vision goggles for that of a spy, the soldier opens fire, then as the poor guy crawls desperately away, he is blown to smithereens with a grenade. Presumably this is what the soldier is trained to do, as he is rewarded for his bravery and given a week's furlough to pull himself together.

Turns out the dead guy was an innocent local, who was killed as he was making love to his girlfriend in a forbidden area of the beach. Naturally, the girlfriend is traumatised by the incident which sends her mad. She starts hanging around the base, clinging to any and all soldiers she finds, mistaking them for her boyfriend. The soldiers are rather obliging, and she winds up pregnant.

The soldier, who also experiences an estrangement from rational thought, is discharged and he too begins to haunt the base, gradually becoming more and more unhinged, and taking revenge on the unit he feels has betrayed him.

Also known as The Coast Guard, this film sheds no new light on anything (unless you're unfamiliar with the existence of two Koreas). I could see no real point to it - all the themes it raises are not resolved. nor are the incidents at all realistic. If the aim of this film was to make a kind of fable, it's a failure. If you want to see a film that has heart, drama, reality and An Actual Point, see Joint Security Area - JSA (2000, director Park Chan-wook)

Eros and Thanatos literalized.

[Polaris_DiB · 8/10 · 9 May 2009]

Kim Ki-duk is something special. Here is a director who makes it quite clear what is being stated, without ever having to say it.

Along the South/North Korean border, a military troop is instructed to kill on site any person trespassing the beach territory after dark, considering them all spies. When a drunken couple head to said beach for their reveries, tragedy ensues as the man is shot and killed mid-coitus. The woman involved goes insane from shock and becomes an infantilized sex addict. The man who shot her lover goes insane from grief and becomes a maniac with a death wish. The two then slowly begin to tear apart the military compound with their insanity.

The movie is focused on the border and rather isolated in general. Though extras appear and a few scenes are set in the city, most of the action revolves around a rather separate and hermetic community of soldiers and fisherman civilians, and it's really easy to feel as if the rest of the world is entirely cut off from this area with the fences and such. Ki-duk is pointing out that in isolation, a community begins to tear itself apart from the inside, and from the perspective of the Koreans the concept is directly pointed towards their current borders.

By and large this is a horror film. The characters are haunted by a tragedy caused by the necessities of their social roles. No one is willing to stand up for what is right, so all must eventually suffer.

--PolarisDiB

Promising start, but gets boring after first half

[AlainS · 4/10 · 24 February 2003]

Korea is divided into South and North Korea. They share the DMZ (Demilitarised Zone) and also in the past spies showed up on the south korean coast. Thats why Coast Guards are all around the coast to protect South Korea from damage.

This movie is about a south korean soldier, who serves as a coast guard. He is very enthusiastic about his services and takes it a bit too serious. In one night he shoots a "spy" who shows up on the coastal area. But it is actually not a spy, but a civilian who lived nearby. This event seriously messes up the lives of many people.

*** Small Spoilers ***

I thought this was a promising theme, but after about the first half of the movie, the movie gets out of hand and tries to be a thriller, while picturing the now lunatic minds of the involved persons. For me the second part was just too unbelievable.

They could have made a much better story with showing the people trying to deal with it.

4/10

Not your father's Coast Guard

[markbeardslee · 9/10 · 29 January 2007]

Writer and director Kim (3 Iron and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring) broaches new territory in this tight, riveting drama about the ugly underbelly of a society in perpetual preparation for war. Kim admirers may miss the understated beauty and gentleness of Kim's previous work in this gritty, realistic rendering of modern Korea's army, complete with fierce beatings, "accidental" shootings and the inculcation of warrior bloodlust in its fresh, young recruits. In a rare introduction, Kim explains that he made the film as a statement against war and to help viewers realize that a nation always on a war footing can never be a happy one.

Astute viewers will not miss the parallels with films about America's Vietnam experience, such as Born on the Fourth of July, Casualties of War and, perhaps most apt, Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Kim's message is clear: the nature of Korea's mandatory conscripted military is a destructive social element that should be altered.

While Kim revolves his story around a private in a platoon based on the seashore who is obsessed with finding and shooting a North Korean spy, his artist's vision and broad understanding of contemporary social issues leads us into adjacent themes, including the effect of the military on civilians, his culture's strict adherence to obedience to elders and the ultimate madness that the brutal disciplinary conditions engender in young Korean men. Private Kang is the story's simultaneous protagonist and antagonist as he takes his duties to extremes, always wearing camouflage paint, ambushing fellow enlistees and terrorizing area fishermen. One night, he sees images of people in restricted space through his night vision goggles and opens fire, killing a local man while he is making drunken love to his girlfriend Mi-young (portrayed in startling fashion by Park Ji-a). Despite the circumstances, his superiors reward Kang for following standing orders by firing on intruders in the restricted zone, and he is granted a leave of absence to visit his family in Seoul.

And this is just the beginning of the story. Kang becomes increasingly unstable, the local civilians increasingly vengeful, and his peers and superiors increasingly confused about how to handle Kang. Eventually, he is discharged from the service but faces shame and dishonor both at home and within the military, from which he cannot bring himself to break away. In this regard, The Coast Guard examines military recruits as trained killing machines and begs the question of what they are to do when they are no longer asked to kill. Again, American audiences will find chilly reminders of Vietnam-era soldiers who were ostracized by the very people they vowed to protect. As Kang's delusions progress, Mi-young descends toward her own doom in an Ophelian self-destructive and insanity-soaked orgy of despair and depravity.

No happy endings here, folks. This is Kim at the edge of his expertise. He has played the madness card before, with sex and violence in passionate personal dramas. But to directly characterize his country's military status quo as culturally destructive is a first. Kim deftly avoids political pronouncements, yet the message of this disturbing film resonates long and loud beyond the final scene.

Rather tiresome film, with some powerful scenes

[tomgillespie2002 · 4/10 · 19 September 2011]

Kang (Dong-Gun Jang) is a soldier assigned to patrol the border of the North-South Korea divide. His sole job is to shoot anyone that crosses the border, as they are to be considered North Korean spies. As it holds many rewards, Kang is eager to kill someone. One night on duty in town, he gets into an argument with a gang of youths having drinks, including Mi-Yeong (Ji-A Park). As a means of defying the soldiers who they believe are just living easy off the tax payers' money, Mi-Yeong crosses the border with a young man and the two have sex. Kang spots the man's head and opens fire, killing him, and throws a grenade that blows him apart. Mi-Yeong descends into madness, stalking the army camp and having sex with various soldiers. Kang also goes mad with guilt, and is eventually dismissed from the coast guard, only return with vengeance on his mind.

As good as the premise for this film sounds, I really did find it disappointingly amateurish. The interesting themes lying throughout the film are drowned out by bad plotting, and simply unbelievable incidents. How Kang, a relatively green soldier with no real combat experience, turns into a super-slick Jason Bourne-alike who can deceive a whole patrol overnight is just ridiculous. It's clear that director Ki-Duk Kim is trying to portray the soldiers as useless, but the amount of times they are disarmed by having their weapons simply grabbed out of their hands is unrealistic. And some scenes are just repeated over and over again, notably Kang appearing, ravaged by madness, not realising he has been dismissed, only to be told he is mad by his ex-fellow servicemen and punched and kicked away. It gets tiresome quickly, and appears that the director just ran out of ideas.

It's not to say that some parts of the film aren't effective. The tragic Mi-Yeong, having slept with many of the soldiers believing them to be her dead ex-lover, finds herself pregnant. Her brother, enraged, demands that the soldiers responsible come forward. Mi-Yeong kisses the guilty men one by one on the cheek, gleefully unaware of the gravity of the situation, only for her brother to stare horrified as one after the other step forward. The scene where she crawls into her brother's fish tank, bloody from a forced abortion, is truly brilliant. The water fills up with blood as she sits there, unable to grasp what is happening. It's a powerful scene in a disappointingly poor film.

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Meltdown...

[poe426 · 8/10 · 13 September 2007]

It's understandable: trained to kill or be killed, on edge (figuratively and literally, keeping watch at the border), raw recruits can get trigger happy. The consequences aren't always easy to live with. His malleable young mind already badly molded, it's understandable when THE COAST GUARD begins a gradual but total mental meltdown. (All it takes these days is one long, thoughtful look at the geopolitical landscape to send one screaming for cover...) I grew up with a Vietnam vet; I know, from firsthand observation over a ten-year period, what killing can do to a man's mind. It ain't pretty. (And, just to enlighten you: he was leading a patrol along a trail when a Vietnamese woman and a young child appeared before them. He told the woman, in Vietnamese, to stop where she was. She came toward him and his men. He repeated his warning; she ignored him. He killed her and her kid. His men rushed forward to check the bodies and found both of them strapped with enough explosives to kill the entire platoon. When one of his men asked this sergeant how he knew the two were booby-trapped, he responded: "I didn't." I don't think he ever went another day of his life without getting totally, mind-numbingly drunk.) THE COAST GUARD is a film most definitely worth seeing.