Prashast Singh Movie: Tidal Wave (12): Action/Drama - KoreanPositives:Sol Kyung-gu is impressive as always. Ha Ji-won is highly impressive as well. Rest of the cast also does a near-perfect job.The action/disaster scenes of the film deserve a special mention as they are very neatly executed. Visual effects are pretty impressive and enhance the film's entertainment to a great extent.The emotional scenes are impactful and have been executed with excellence.The story is quite good and the message of the film is appealing.Negatives:The only negative is that it takes too long to arrive at the main point. Although the first half does showcase some good character development and makes us understand them even more, the comedic bits are at times overdone and could've been easily done away with. In short, it's only the editing which is a major flaw.TIDAL WAVE is a decent disaster film which does take its own sweet time to build up, but it makes sure to reward the viewer for his/her patience, in the second half with excellent visual effects and action scenes.

Leofwine_draca This lacklustre disaster flick should have been so good: it features tremendously good special effects scenes of 100-metre high waves tearing through a city, laying waste to anything and everything in their path. These scenes alone are among some of the best bits I've ever watched in the whole disaster genre; destruction and mayhem on a massive scale, with carefully-crafted CGI bringing the chaos to full and authentic life.It's a shame, then, that the surrounding movie is so poor. Tidal Wave takes an hour to get to the disaster stuff, and until that time we're treated to…Korean comedy. Now, I don't mind a bit of comedy, the quirkier the better; THE HOST had a lot of fun moments. But this comedy is something else, the comedy of ridiculous characters behaving ridiculously, almost on a sub-slapstick standard. The over-the-top acting is absolutely appalling; I avoid American comedies on principle but this is even worse than those.Of course, disaster movies always have to build up to the disaster, and I fully understand the need to develop the characters before dropping them in the clag. But, in my mind, the film should always be about the disaster, even before it occurs: have characters making warnings that are unheeded, or build suspense and foreboding with minor events preceding it. DANTE'S PEAK is a case in point of how to achieve this. TIDAL WAVE sits in a completely different, and entirely superfluous, genre until the actual disaster occurs.Once the chaos gets underway, things get a lot better, although there's a reliance on overwrought melodrama which will test the patience of even the most hardened viewer, I imagine. Endless scenes of characters facing death, drawn out in painful slow-motion and with maximum crying, screaming, sobbing and telling each other they love them. Such scenes are a personal pet hate of mine, and they threaten to overwhelm the film even when the going gets good. It's a real shame, as with access to those special effects TIDAL WAVE could have, and should have, been a true great.

dbborroughs Painful mess of a movie concerning the people living in and around Haeundae (I believe thats the cities name) who go through various serious and comedic gyrations while officials debate the possibility of a tsunami like the one that hit on Christmas 2004 near Sumatra hitting Korea. Of course huge earthquake happens which triggers the greatly feared event.Real mess of a movie doesn't know whether its serious or a comedy. Even by standards of Asian films which often mix moods, this is a real uneven movie.One need only watch the disaster sequences to see how terrible tragedy is inter-cut with some very silly moments. Of course it would help if we had some characters to root for but unfortunately there are only card board cut outs that are moved around.Then again I doubt anyone would watch this film for the story, what most people want is the spectacle of the Tsunami and on that score the film is pretty good. Granted most of the effects are computer generated which results in some uneven moments (the destruction of the aquarium is pretty bottom of the barrel fake). I'm not sure its worth navigating through the talky bits of the first hour, but on DVD getting to the good stuff is going to be rather painless.At best a rental, this is really only for people who want to see the destruction of 50 or 60 story waves crashing into a big city. All others best look elsewhere.

DICK STEEL I suppose most are now acutely aware of how increasingly devastating natural disasters have been in recent years, starting from the 2004 Asian Tsunami which swallowed thousands of unfortunate souls. Then there are the recent destruction caused by typhoons and earthquakes, the latter which we're more acquainted with given the tremors which we feel as a result of neighbouring incidents, a phenomenon not experienced until the last few years.There are numerous accounts of heroics and tragedy following every disaster, and it's not a surprise that they have become fodder for mass entertainment. We had 252: Signal of Life as the Japanese offering to the disaster genre earlier this year, and the Koreans too have decided to match that with Haeundae: The Deadly Tsunami. With 252 it was the disaster hitting hard and fast first, followed by the shoving of human melodrama down your throat, and thankfully though Haeundae is quite the opposite, having the human drama established first without feeling forced, before the special effects extravaganza took over.So if you belong to Camp Impatient, then you're likely to feel bored as the film sought to introduce the ensemble characters, each with their respective back-stories and selfish reasons why they go about doing what they are doing, of course with repercussions all nicely built in as well for some karmic response. There's the fisherman and the romance with the daughter of a man whom he had caused the death of, and this provided most of the emotional anchor for the film. Then there are others like the opposites attract with the coast guard and the free-spirited girl from Seoul, a seemingly scheming politician who's in some kind of en-bloc mess with the folks of the coastal village, a much maligned scientist and his estranged wife and daughter, and enough overbearing mothers.All these provided some 60 minutes worth of dramatic run time before it's time for Nature to hit back with its tidal waves, where quick response to an actual event will save lives, which stemmed from complacency creeping in when early warning signals went uncalled for. The filmmakers here had realistically created the phenomenon of the massive tidal waves with the receding waters and such, and the effects here were nothing short of eye-popping. Fear-inducing even, though there was one quick scene which seemed lifted from Hollywood's Deep Impact upon reconciliation of 2 characters in the face of impending doom.But of course budget dictated that the effects could only sustain the movie for a short while, and anything more than 2 wave cycles would probably either be cost-prohibitive, or just plain dragging out the misery of the characters in their preservation of lives. Some fade-to-black-at-opportune-moments also came to the rescue of the film, and cheesiness reined comical supreme needlessly as well, though no efforts were spared in others especially the one involving the little girl left in the hotel room, providing that edge-of-your-seat thrills in what would be a literal roller-coaster ride in the last half hour.Haeundae served more as a disaster film without any preachy overtones regarding the preservation of the environment. In earnest, I thought the release of this film was more like serving up an appetizer to the bigger budgeted extravaganza come November with 2012. That, I want to see.