Road infection

Disaster movie “The Emergency” by South Korean director Han Jae Rim is at the box office. Watching the many misfortunes that overtake the passengers of the plane flying from Seoul to Honolulu, one after another, Julia Shagelman almost with nostalgia she remembered the very recent times, when the biggest threat to humanity seemed to be just some kind of deadly virus.

When watching the film, you can’t leave the thought that it was inspired by the coronavirus pandemic, but in fact its production began back in 2019. At the same time, ironically, work on the painting was suspended twice precisely because of outbreaks of COVID-19. Nevertheless, in the summer of 2021, The Emergency finally made it to the Cannes Film Festival, where it had its world premiere (out of competition, of course), and this year, finally, to screens around the world. And, despite the fact that its release on the screens at home was postponed for eight months, again due to the coronavirus, it took sixth place in the national box office.

The Emergency begins, in the tradition of disaster films, with the introduction of heroes for whom we will need to worry. Handsome single father Park Jae Hyuk (Lee Byung Hoon) is about to fly to Hawaii with his little daughter Soo Min (Kim Bo Min) as he hopes the clean sea air will help ease her skin condition. At the same time, dad himself is terribly nervous at the prospect of spending several hours in the air – why, it will become clear later. On the same Sky Korea flight K1501, the wife of police inspector Ku In-ho (Song Kang-ho) took a ticket. A detective so immersed in his work that he learns about the departure of his wife, with whom he lives in the same apartment, only by talking on the phone with his daughter, receives a call: some kids saw a video on the Internet in which an unknown man threatens to arrange a terrorist attack on an airplane . Perhaps all this is just a stupid joke, but for the sake of his wife, Koo In Ho decides to check just in case.

While he and his partner figure out the suspect’s place of residence and discover the classic psychopathic killer’s lair behind the door of an unremarkable apartment (there is even a corpse wrapped in plastic), a young man wanders around the airport with a frighteningly blissful expression on his face and tries to find out at the information desk which flight with the most passengers. Of course, this man who looks like a member of the K-pop group (played by the member of the K-pop group “Ze:A” Lim Si Wan) is the same terrorist, and part-time microbiologist Ryu Jin Suk, who developed the deadly virus. It is he who brings it on board the Sky Korea K1501, sewing the test tube into his own armpit.

Further, events develop rapidly: Ryu Jin Suk spills a powder with a virus in the toilet of an airplane, and now a business class passenger who burst into the cabin, pushing little Su Min out of the way, dies in terrible agony. At first, no one understands what is happening, but the investigation continues on the ground, led by Inspector Ku In Ho, all the details of which instantly get into the news, and on board, which is very convenient for the scenario, Wi-Fi and even mobile communications work. Therefore, passengers very quickly learn that they are in for a quick and unpleasant death. The terrorist is calculated and, twisted, sent to the cargo hold, but this does not affect the situation in any way: he is already infected, like everyone else, and, unlike the others, is mentally ready to die, and there is no antidote or vaccine for a terrible virus.

In many ways, “The Emergency” is reminiscent of the Korean zombie thriller “Train to Busan” (2016), where there was also a virus that turned the passengers of a rushing train at full speed into the walking dead, while they bickered over whether to somehow isolate already infected by everyone else. Han Jae Rim also has this scene, although isolating someone on an airplane where the ventilation system is circling the same air is impossible by definition. Fortunately, no one here rises from the dead to bite a neighbor, but everything else is available: emergency government meetings, personal dramas in the anamnesis of not one but two pilots, international conflicts, an insidious pharmaceutical company, chasing potential witnesses through crowded rural streets, saving a plane from an inevitable crash (at least three times), heroic self-sacrifice and, of course, a child’s tear. All this looks like a hundred films about viruses, disasters and airplanes, squeezed into one, albeit a long one, including – despite the exceptional seriousness of the authors – the parody “Airplane!” Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers. The authors try by all means to arrange an emotional roller coaster for the audience (or, if you like, a flight in a turbulence zone), but looking at the suffering of fictional characters on screen is still not as scary as, say, reading the news in the real world. Even if between the first and second in the film sometimes there is a little more in common than we would like for an escapist spectacle.