Doomsday Book
Doomsday Book comes from Korea. As a fan of Japanese live action films stepping into Korean sci-fi wasn't to far. Similar styles of direction and sense of comedy are apparent. Three separate stories with no connection to each other than the theme of doomsday tie the films together. The second film is very loosely connected to the "end of the world" idea. The Korean themes are seen in Japanese films often; A very minor detail might lead to a problem of epic proportions. Family makes any situation a sitcom. Robots reach human intelligence. All of these are easily found in Japanese entertainment.
This might have been released around the time of the Mayan calendar saying the world will end and it was smart to do so. Three short films about the end of the world eat up your attention and maybe your brains. The first film features an epidemic of zombies. Now I love zombie films and there's some great moments one being a annoying family coming back from vacation amidst a zombie apocalypse, but the origin of the zombie virus in this one was a bit stupid. What starts out as a young man trying to find love ends with the undead destroying the world. It becomes more of nod to classic zombie films.
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The next film is about a robot achieving enlightenment. It's sort of a mix of ghost in the shell and A.I. minus the awful character Shia LeBouff played. The robot that's making everyone worried might be the reincarnation of Buddha. The story is mainly about the Buddha robot and the engineer who has to decide on repairing him if being Buddha is a problem. Now how this ties into the end of the world theme, this is a far connection, is that if robots can achieve enlightenment where do humans go. It's more of a spiritual corruption of humanity then let's say robots just killing people. Even though it connected poorly to the other films it didn't seem out of place. The robots and world created for this was eye-catching and I'd like to see more of it.
Did you ever buy something on the internet and feel like the price was to good to be true? The last film rounds up the end of the world with the silly concept of a 8 ball from the game of billiards coming to Earth as a giant meteor. Why is a giant 8 ball headed towards Earth? Because a young girl lost her Uncle's 8 ball and ordered it off the internet from an alien web-site. Even as the world ends the corny jokes about family and sitcom like pacing come through on this one.
The first two films are for those more into sci-fi. The third is for those who want to laugh and reminded me a little of a 90's kids movie.
I hate the directors previous works. Jee-woon Kim and Pil-Sung Yim did I Saw The Devil and The Host separately and both were just awful to follow. Reasoning and logic don't seem to follow what happens in their films most of the time. It explains the bad origin of the zombie virus. The Buddha robot chapter lacking the violence and crazy nature of the other films was still a stunning looking into spirituality and what it means to believe in faith.
