Kim Byung-woo clearly didn’t want The Great Flood (now on Netflix) to be just another disaster movie. But how much one can talk about the film’s subversion of formula before encroaching the Spoilerville city limits is the question, so we’ll have to tread lightly here. I can say there’s a significant amount of sci-fi peanut butter mixed in with the natural-disaster chocolate, with a healthy scattering of puzzle-movie crumble-topping added to the recipe. But whether Kim’s attempt to squish together two, maybe two-and-a-half genres is functional? That’s the big Q with this one.
The Gist: Why is this kid so obsessed with swimming and diving? It’s as if Ja-in (Kwon Eun-seong) knows what’s going to happen on this fateful day as he rouses his mother An-na (Kim Da-mi) from sleep. She’s groggy and grumpy and he’s wearing swim goggles and “diving” beneath the bedcovers. As she putters into the kitchen to field a call from her mother and make some breakfast, she hears a rumble outside the high-rise. Outside the window, a vicious storm has flooded the streets, but she doesn’t realize how quickly the waters are rising until it’s an inch deep in the apartment, then ankle-deep, then, very soon, alarmingly higher-than-knee-deep. And this being a movie that perhaps doesn’t have a firm grip on how six-year-olds really react to situations like this, Ja-in is delighted, because he can swim inside his own home! Yay!
There may be an excuse for such annoying behavior lurking later in this plot, but we can’t get into that right now so let’s just focus on how An-na gives up on packing a suitcase and just grabs the plot-device medicine satchel (maybe Ja-in is diabetic?) and gets out of the apartment and heads up up up as the waters rise and towering tsunamis rush toward this batch of high-rises. Up up up in theory, anyway – the elevators are dead and the stairways are jammed with people dragging baggage and house plants and blenders and whatever, like they can’t make it to the end of the world without a protein smoothie. OK, I didn’t specifically see a blender, but you get the sense of panic. A wave slams into the building, prompting a flashback that explains An-na’s single-mom status, and prompting one to wonder how long a person can hold their breath, and the answer is, longer than you could if you weren’t in a movie.
Oh, one more answer to that: Long enough to make it to the next scene, in which a corporate security agent named Son Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo) manages to find An-na and Ja-in. Why? An-na is a scientist who’s been working in a top-secret AI laboratory. She’s important as all hell. Hee-jo explains that an asteroid hit Antarctica, and the outlook is less than ideal. “The human race as we know it will end today,” he tells An-na. “It’s your job to create the new human race.” But hey, no pressure! There’s a helicopter on the roof waiting to take her and Ja-in to wherever so she can do whatever. They just have to find a way up up up, which is easier said than done, because the tsunamis keep coming and gas pipes explode and she gets separated from the kid and distracted by other people who need help. And it’s right about here when the narrative ground begins to shift and I have to duct-tape the ol’ flapper shut.
Photo: Netflix / Courtesy Everett Collection
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Well, there’s Titanic amounts of dampness here, with elements of disaster epics like The Impossible (very good, by the way) and The Day After Tomorrow (very bad, by the way), so cross that with [REDACTED] and you’ve got The Great Flood.
Performance Worth Watching: The exploration of the thornier aspects of motherhood is a current thematic trend (see: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Die My Love, Nightbitch, The Lost Daughter, etc.), and Kim Da-mi taps into some of that with her rock-solid work in The Great Flood. But the purity of her protective-mama performance is ultimately muddied by the (unwelcome?) sci-fi elements of this story.
Sex And Skin: None.
Photo: Netflix
Our Take: Seriously, I sometimes feel like An-na must be a professionally trained freediver considering how far she can swim in a single breath, which she does with alarming frequency. But that’s just a tiny niggling nitpick I have with The Great Flood, especially in comparison to its greater, more fundamental problem: Kim Byung-woo’s attempt to glue two movies together into one big movie and have it make sense thematically and emotionally. Kim and Han Ji-su’s screenplay is bifurcated into the rote but effective, reptile-brain survivalist thriller of the first half and the far less effective and more cerebral second half. It’s as if the story is modeled after the two hemispheres of the human brain, although having a rather tenuous and threadbare corpus callosum connecting them doesn’t work in its favor.
And so our experience of the film goes from gee I hope they don’t die to what the hell is going on, as we lean toward the screen and scrunch up our faces in puzzlement. The film puts us through a few harrowing instances of near-drowning and dangling from precarious heights, Kim getting the adrenaline pumping with skillfully choreographed action sequences and convincing special effects. Then it becomes a high-concept sci-fi mess that’s reminiscent of other movies that shall not be mentioned here, but more confusingly executed. And it’s in the second half that the movie reveals how it wants to be a brain-blower-away-er in the general ballpark of Interstellar, but ends up being more of a headscratcher.
At this point, we should delineate the difference between complexity and complication – the former implies intricacy and detail, while the latter implies a more disheveled messiness. And so The Great Flood is a complicated movie, one that struggles to delineate how and why this reality functions as it does, its “rules,” so to speak. Maybe it takes a second viewing to piece together the visual clues and inferences, but one run-through of this exhausting and repetitive movie seems like enough. Chalk it up as an ambitious but muddled misfire.
Our Call: The Great Flood is clearly trying to upend traditional disaster-movie narratives – a little too hard. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
