Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6283 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-09-05
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Formats: Anamorphic, Box set, Dubbed, PAL
• Subtitled in: English
• Dubbed in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 142 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
A big, bruising epic of the Korean War, Tae Guk Gi or Brotherhood smashed box-office records when it played in South Korea in 2004, almost as though the country needed to re-live the trauma at a 50-year distance. For the rest of the world, this movie looks like a ground-level reckoning in a melodramatic key, with an authentic feel for battle lines as well as home front. It follows two brothers--one uneducated and forceful, the other intellectual and reserved--as they are united and then divided by the conflict. The broadly emotional story has some of the power of tales of the American Civil War, when family members found themselves on opposite sides of a battle. Director Kang Je-gyu , who made the lively female-assassin hit Shiri, takes a blunt approach to the material (including a Saving Private Ryan-style framing device). And at 150 minutes, he has plenty of time for head-splitting, blood-spraying combat. This movie is meant as a punch in the stomach, and it connects. --Robert Horton, Amazon.com

Synopsis
Brothers Jin-Seok (Bin Won) and Jin-Tae (Dong-Kun Jang) come from a family whose unremitting struggle with poverty has led them to place all their hopes in Jin-seok, the younger of the two. His older brother Jin-Tae shines shoes in order to raise money to send him to university, while their mother runs a noodle shop; the patriarch has passed away, leaving the little family to fend for themselves. Their precarious aspirations are shattered by the outbreak of the Korean War, when Jin-Seok is drafted and Jin-Tae joins up as well, in order to work for his brother's release. He has neither the influence nor the financial means to send Jin-Seok back home; his only hope lies in the acceptance of dangerous missions that will earn him the Medal of Honour and his brother's release. Jin-Seok, however, does not understand his brother's intentions, and mistakes his valiant bravery for misplaced patriotism and greedy ambition, until finally and tragically he is confronted by the truth. Upon its release, this moving war drama became the highest-grossing film in Korea.

Customer Reviews

Coming at it from a different angle
Oh Dear. Imagine a Korean version of Saving Private Ryan. Now replace Tom Hanks with Rambo. Replace the scriptwriter with a fourteen year old boy, miles from home, who has forgotten to take his brain medication and misses his mum. Replace the camera crew with a team of blind chimps that have been trained to point their cameras at loud noises. Now replace the supporting actors with hysterical coked-up acrobats. And finally replace you, the viewer, with someone else.

Now, if you're a bit slow at reading subtitles, fear not; you don't need the script to follow the story, the screen shows you everything. And don't worry about those uncomfortable pauses - every second of this lengthy film is filled with the sweet sound of hysterical jabbering, cheesy orchestral incidental music, and explosions. Oh, the explosions. After a while you stop noticing them.

Okay, you can probably tell I don't much like this kind of war movie, so approaching it more objectively... I guess if you were a fan of the genre, Brotherhood might be quite good. It is a high budget offering with some realistic special effects, gore, lots of buildings and soil and people exploding, a strong, silent hero fighting for family values against the evil oppression of the commies... maybe if you love this type of film, I can see how at a push you might give it 4 out of 5. However, if you're coming at it from a different angle and are a fan of World Cinema, I think it's unlikely that you will have the stamina to watch it all the way through. As an action movie it doesn't have the tongue-in-cheek kitsch of Stephen Seagal or the amusing one-liners of Arnie that make it possible to watch pap at 2am when you're drunk. Brotherhood is a serious effort about a historical war, real political movements and proper death, so no room for chuckles - but neither is there significant depth or subtlety to stimulate the brain or heart muscles. I can't help but feel this potentially interesting subject matter has fallen into the wrong hands, like a journal that is discovered by a village idiot and promptly eaten. Frankly I am disappointed with myself for making the assumption that if an eastern film has made the leap of being accepted in the west in subtitled form, it must be worth it.

Masterful!
Ive just finished watching this and felt immediately compelled to write a review, this is probably the best war film ive ever seen! Amazing direction, brutal and bloody but also moving. This is not just a realistic potrayal of war, its also a beautiful story that is well acted and superbly made! Buy it!! You wont regret it!

A different perspective on a forgotten war
Tae Guk Gi/Brotherhood of War suffers from being the hundredth film to adopt Spielberg and Kaminski's by now rather tired and clichéd approach to filming battle scenes a la Saving Private Ryan but gains both from its fresh perspective - the Korean War from the Korean viewpoint - and from honest sentiment. The story may be War Hunt revisited as two brothers go to war only to be divided as one is morally consumed by it, but it is surprisingly and genuinely moving come the finale (which handles the modern-day framing device much better than Spielberg's epic). Curiously, the film is very critical of South Korea's conduct of the war, both at the front and at home, and all the more powerful for it.

With Korea very much a forgotten war these days, it's good that the DVD extras on the two-disc set include some historical perspective alongside a detailed account of the film's production.