The small provincial town of Hope Harbour is the setting of chaos in Na Hong-jin's Hope. When a large monster wreaks havoc, causing widespread destruction and multiple deaths, a group of locals, including a police chief and his accomplice, find themselves becoming the town's saving grace.
Hope is a strange film. Whether you interpret that as a good or bad thing is up to you, because it's both at once. It's an all-out, balls-to-the-walls action epic akin to the maximalist machismo of Michael Bay's cinema. However, it's also a film with ambitions to warrant a franchise, stuffing in world-building and character development that only confuse rather than clarify.
Clocking in at more than two-and-a-half hours, the action takes front and centre, and it's impossible not to be mesmerized by its high energy. Hope can be exhausting due to the excesses of its set pieces, but it's impressive nonetheless. Isolating its action from its other elements, it may very well be one of the best action films you'll see this year.
The film has a wild first hour, where the village faces slim chances of survival because of a monster causing immense damage to buildings and people alike. This monster is terrifying because we haven't seen anything like it. It sprints like a car, throws people around like toys, and seems impenetrable to firearm shots.
The more we learn about the monster, its species and where it came from, the more Hope loses its footing. Out of nowhere, the film wades into complex sci-fi territory about assimilation and the cost of alien life that we're meant to empathize with, but it only feels forced and distracting when sandwiched between the grounded spectacle it was already doing well with.
Ultimately, Hope is a film torn between two identities: a bombastic creature feature spectacle and an overreaching sci-fi franchise starter. When it commits fully to the former, it's a thrilling, if bloated, ride. But every detour into the latter chips away at the momentum it works so hard to build. If Na Hong-jin trims the ambition and trusts the monster movie he's already made, "Hope" could have been something far leaner and more memorable.
"Hope" opens in New Zealand cinemas on September 17, 2026.
Featured images from Madman Entertainment/ NEON.
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