I love seeing South Korea dramatize its own history, and that’s what led me to watching this film in the first place. They tend to do it with a lot of verve and panache, and I also get inspired to read a bit about their history. The years of instability and political upheaval between the Korean War and the finalization of its democratic constitution (1953-1987) are to me the most fascinating.

By coincidence, the day before I watched this, Lee Jae-myung was made president in a snap election following Yoon Suk Yeol’s attempted self-coup and subsequent impeachment. In time, that event will definitely be made into its own film.

Silmido was ultimately a far more knotty film than I had expected during the first act. I made the assumption during the first hour that it was a box office success because it would depict self-sacrifice done under the flag of patriotism. That was incorrect. It is instead a bold assertion of wrongdoing done by the South Korean government. This is not as subversive as it may sound to many of the English-speaking populations of the world, because this film is not criticizing the current South Korean government. It is criticizing a past government—one which was an authoritarian regime. That said, I imagine this was nonetheless quite a thorny issue when the film was released, especially given the film’s role in unearthing this bit of history.

Though the ultimate resolution that I predicted in the first half was incorrect, my guess as to the tone of the film was very much correct and carried all the way through—lots of yelling, threats, shows of strength, bravado, and camaraderie. It’s a very Asian film. You’ll see this tone in mainstream films in Japan, China, Vietnam, Cambodia—all across Asia. If you were to translate it note for note into an English-language film, you would be left with something noisy and awful and starring Nick Cage. But it’s not in English. It’s in Korean, and it works, even if it’s never dignified and even a bit trashy. It gets the job done. Perhaps it’s the Asian equivalent of a product of the Hollywood system: something that sticks to a template that has been honed for decades, which you both love and lament for not straying far from.