There are very few great directors with a near perfect record of feature films because the more movies you make the greater the odds that you’ll eventually make a stinker. Steven Spielberg has Always and Hook, David Fincher made The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Francis Ford Coppola shat out Jack. [Editor's note: The labeling of these films as "stinkers" is solely my opinion, and definitely not condoned by Webster's Dictionary or Mr. DeFrank.]
But there’s at least one fantastic director who has yet to release a disappointment…you just have to look outside Hollywood.
South Korea’s Kim Ji-woon has six feature films to his name so far, and all of them are pretty damn stellar across a wide range of genres. The Quiet Family, The Foul King, A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life, The Good the Bad the Weird, and I Saw the Devil. He’s currently filming his English-language debut (The Last Stand) with Arnold Schwarzenegger so this statement may not hold past next year, but for now the man is a golden god.
His latest project, Doomsday Book, is an omnibus film that sees him contributing one of the two (or three?) segments alongside Lim Pil-seong (Hansel & Gretel) and possibly Han Jae-rim. The film is apocalypse themed with Kim’s segment featuring a robot gaining sentience and Lim’s focusing on a virus that leads to zombie hijinks.
Check out the trailer below for Doomsday Book.
That’s one hell of a flu virus.
And yes, I’m just as confused by the goings-ons here as you probably are. The gist appears to be that robots come to life, invent a plague to wipe out humanity and then find their world domination short lived when an ironic asteroid crashes into the planet. I could be reading into this a bit too much.
Regardless, the movie looks interesting and well worth your time.
[Thanks to the always awesome 24Frames Per Second for the heads up on the subtitled trailer.]