A Review of “#alive (2020)”

 

After the disappointing Peninsula, I stumbled upon another Korean Zombie movie. #Alive has a simple premise in that “Oh Joon-woo (Yoo Ah-in) a gamer is left isolated in his families apartment when an infection leaves an entire city filled with zombies”. The zombie genre is very over saturated so does this movie stand out or is just part of the horde of mediocre zombie movies.

I got to praise the pacing of this movie because it gets straight into the action within the first 3 minutes. It doesn’t delay with an exposition or massive setup. It knows what you’re watching it for and by doing this it successfully keeps the audience engaged the moment the movie begins. For the most part, the movie maintains this pacing but it does slow at a couple of points. However, it never slows down for too long and manages to always add some new element of danger to keep the characters on their toes. The zombie action, on the whole, is generally fun to watch. They are not groundbreaking or visually insane like “Train to Busan” but they are generally fun looking scenes.

I also like some of the ideas director “Cho Il-hyung” implements in this movie to make it stand out a bit. Firstly, the movie focuses primarily on one person “Oh Joon-woo” (Yoo Ah-in). Most zombie movies usually focus on a group of survivors with some dying but by focusing on one person it makes it easy for the audience to relate more with him and understand his loneliness. Eventually, the movie does introduce a second survivor “Kim Yoo-bin” (Park Shin-hye) but this adds to the theme of “loneliness” in this movie. Furthermore, I also enjoy that the director considered the modern setting by having wifi, social media and even modern technology like drones in the movie. It makes it feel more believable and adds some new elements into the zombie genre. The actors Yoo Ah-in and Park Shin-hye do a phenomenal job in giving emotive and convincing performances. They really sell on the desperation these characters go through.

However, I do have some gripes with this movie and the first being the lack of characterisation. We the audience get some suggestions at who Oh Joon-woo is such as being a gamer but apart from that he isn’t very interesting. The movie does a fairly good job at making us care for him because of his situation but it doesn’t do a good job at making us really like him that much. He is very bland and generic which is probably intented to make the audience easily put themselves into his position. However, he makes a lot of really dumb decisions at time which I definitely wouldn’t have done. On the other hand, Kim Yoo-bin has no characterisation whatsoever. I know almost nothing about her and they never really go into depth about who she was before the apocalypse. It baffles me why the main character never asks her about this but whatever.

The third act of this movie also embodies all the cliches from a lot of zombie movies and is extremely generic which is a bit disappointing compared to the first two acts. To their credit the ending is still satisfying despite being cliche. The story is also incredibly predictable and there also very predictable jump scares as well (although the jump scares are very few).

Overall, it’s an all right zombie movie. It isn’t groundbreaking but what it does, it does very well. It tackles the zombie genre with a clear theme of loneliness and it explores this theme well. Additionally, I also appreciate that the zombie apocalypse isn’t on a country scale as a lot of zombie movies do this and seeing a more competent government is quite refreshing. This also plays a part into the theme as well. I came into this movie to have an enjoyable time and this movie most definitely succeed in that.