#ALIVE Review
For a movie about a gamer trapped in his apartment as a zombie apocalypse occurs at his apartment complex, the woefully titled #ALIVE fails to generate anything of interest from that conceit . Coming from director Il Cho, who wrote the story with Matt Naylor, this Korean zombie flick offers up a slickly made film that will deliver the zombie thrills you expect but with little to no pulse.
The film begins ominously enough as Oh Joon-woo (Yoo Ah-In) wakes to find his apartment empty, with his sister and their parents out at the local store for groceries. Sporting an eye-catching buzzed bleached head, Joon-woo shuffles along back to his room to play some sort of online RPG, gleefully ready to get lost in a digital world. But then his worst fears come to light as the internet cuts off the game. As he frantically tries to find out what’s going on, Joon-woo soon discovers that a very fast infection is taking hold of his apartment complex and its residents, turning any of those bitten by the infected into quick, bloodthirsty ghouls. Realizing it will be a bit for his parents come back and through the army of the dead outside his door, the young man barricades the apartment and waits things out as #ALIVE seems to be setting an I AM LEGEND-type situation of one man facing off against the apocalypse alone.
But just as with that film, Mr. Cho soon introduces another warm body for Joon-woo to team up with, a young woman named Kim Yoo-bin (Park Shin-Hye), who just so happens to live in the building right across from his room. As these two survivors face off against the dead and the living (because what’s a zombie film without a few bad humans), #ALIVE pivots from the interesting idea of a less than ideal “hero” facing off against the undead into an increasingly melodramatic yet plain zombie film. There are interesting pieces here for Mr. Cho to latch onto, whether that’s in his slacking main character or even in the film’s title, which hints at a zombie film viewed through a social media lens, but none of them stick. Outside of those two interesting ideas that go nowhere, #ALIVE more or less just plays the hits of the genre in scenes that you’ve seen before (and executed in ways more interesting).
With its slickly produced look, #ALIVE plays things woefully straight and never really takes any risks to stand out in a massive sub-genre. Mr. Ah-In, in the starring role, pulls off the look of a gamer and despite his generic characterization, gets a few moments here and there to bring some actual sadness and isolation to the increasingly desperate Joon-woo ,but Cho and Naylor damn their main character to a plain journey that brings him from a zero to a plain as oats hero. Indeed, the entirety of Mr. Cho’s film follows this pattern, biting into something interesting and tangible and converting it towards something that lives off unoriginality. Even with a last minute surprise (but not really if you’ve seen a zombie film before) villain, where the film takes its first and only step towards a genuinely dark and tragic look at the consequences of a violent plague, #ALIVE is content to operate like hundreds of other zombie films before with toothless first encounters, cliché close calls, and a shallow relationship that blooms between Joon-woo and Yoo-bin, where both performers do what they can with a script that plays out like a slightly more edgy young adult novel involving zombies.
Nevertheless, the film looks great, attaining a glossy and slick look that reflects the overall quality of most other major Korean films and Cho and his cinematographer Won-ho Son have some fun with the camera, letting it glide and chase our protagonists as they try to survive some admittedly gnarly zombies. Fierce and unrelenting, #ALIVE offers up an impressive legion of the undead as the makeup crew and the zombie performers bring to life the spastic, decaying ghouls but even they find inspiration from much better sources such as WORLD WAR Z and TRAIN TO BUSAN. In any case, #ALIVE gives off the impression of a film filled with genuine thrills and heart but much like its sprinting zombies, this film is only a well produced shell lacking any sort of life within.
2/5
