Machine Guns, Aliens, Horses, and High Speed U-Turns - The Movie: Hope (2026) Review

Director: Na Hong-jin

Notable Cast: Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Lee Sang-hee, Um Mun-suk, Im Hyun-sik

 

For the start of this review, I want to note that Na Hong-jin, as a director and a writer, had already crafted three films that I would be very tempted to consider masterpieces. The Yellow Sea and The Chaser are incredibly grounded, gritty thrillers that blend action, drama, and horror nearly perfectly. The Wailing, his third film, is a masterpiece that sucker-punches its audience with suffocating folk-horror elements that bleed into dark comedy and some of the most thrilling slow-burn storytelling in genre cinema. 

 

Which is why, after seeing his latest ‘epic,’ Hope, I feel…dysregulated. 

 

Hope is Na Hong-jin drilling further into genre cinema with his swing at an action-spectacle flick. He once again weaves genres together in unconventional ways, and manages to craft a film that is, in the moment, absolutely thrilling to endure, with massive action set pieces, incredibly charming characters, and some of the most tense chases you will see in a film this year - if not this decade. Can’t say I wasn’t absolutely engaged through most of its 2.5+ hour runtime.

 

Yet, Hope is also perhaps the messiest and most baffling film I’ve seen this year. Moment to moment, I was glued to the screen, but its narrative and storytelling are wildly off-kilter at times, setting up expectations for characters, plot, or narrative, then either ignoring them or hammering them home with the power of 10 metric tons of nuclear alien fire. It makes choices that either make it the greatest dumb movie of all time or the dumbest great movie of all time. Depending on how you want to read Na Hong-jin’s intentions, I suppose. 

 

Hope isn't the first film about a small-town sheriff and a small team trying to take on a possible alien/monster presence. The director/writer has been very upfront about his love of genre cinema, and Hope wears it on its sleeves. In particular, the film feels very Hollywood. Its blend of off-beat humor, wild action spectacle, and nonsense science fiction elements easily invokes films like Transformers - although Michael Bay very much feels like an influence here - it is far better made than any film he’s made in decades. Yet its influence shows throughout, even in the film’s unevenness and sporadic narrative. 

 

However, what Na Hong-jin does well with how Hope plays out is to leave its audience breathless. The film starts off with about 10 or 15 minutes of setup, where Sheriff Bum-seok, played by Blood Brothers’ favorite Hwang Jung-min, is called out by some hunters to look at a mutilated cow on the outskirts of town. Don’t be fooled, though; this film has no real interest in building up what this town or its characters are prior to the events that quickly take place. It moves too fast to slow down for real character development or arcs, or even to establish its setting. When the sheriff Bum-seok is heading back to town, he gets the call that there is a monster on the loose, and by the time he gets there, practically the entire place is in the process of being demolished. 

 

What transpires for the next 45 minutes is an incredible action set piece. Bold to create a chase sequence that lasts that long, particularly in the first act, but here we are. Between the incredible cinematography, production design, and the manner in which the film manages to introduce wild tangents of various one-scene characters within the mayhem, it’s almost operatic. Bum-seok huffs and puffs his way into trying to stop the alien monster; there are massive explosions and horrific deaths, and it caps off with one of the greatest hero introductions of Officer Lim, played by Squid Game breakout star Hoyeon, who turns out to be the most skilled grenade launcher shooter and high-speed U-turn driver of all time. Ah yes, while that first chunk certainly felt rushed, and while this definitely feels very redundant in how long it runs, this is what Hope is going to be. A wild-ass action flick.

 

Yet, that’s not exactly what Hope is as a film. For all of its love of action tropes that it displays flamboyantly on screen - including perhaps the most fetishistic treatment of guns since the John Wick films - there are often times that the film actively switches a trope mid-moment. If you’ve seen any other film by Na Hong-jin, you know this is one of his greatest auteur aspects. In Hope, though, it often feels baffling and messy. 

 

For example, at one point, a strange fellow (certainly coded as low-intelligence and highly strange) is introduced as having killed one of the aliens himself. This character would often be introduced as the comedic relief and, to be fair, it feels like the film initially does that with how Sheriff Bum-seok reacts to him, but it soon plays him off with a creepy and often unnerving tone - like perhaps he belongs to the Sawyer family from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s a weird choice that tonally feels off from the rest of the film.

 

This happens numerous times. Even in the world it builds, most of it doesn’t make sense. Our lead character is a local sheriff with family ties in the area, but doesn’t seem to know anyone in the town? The monster aliens are treated as absolute animals, akin to the Xenomorph from the Alien franchise, until the final 20 minutes? The film spends an entire scene comparing the aliens to people in their build, but then comments on their internal organs, and they essentially never come up again? There are seemingly dozens of narrative and plot threads that are introduced and never addressed again, or ones that distinctively go against what the film has set up before, but not in the great “look at this reveal!” kind of way to get its audience hooked in.

 

That’s all before the ending of the film. The final sequence is comprised of another grandiose action sequence that has the small team of heroes heading into the woods to save the group of hunters from the opening, a secondary plot that reveals more questions and more aliens for the second half of the film, and results in another stunningly executed series of action sequences, from gun battles in the woods to a highway chase in a police car that challenges Fast 6 for the longest stretch of flat road surface in cinema history. This is also where it's revealed that the casting of Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender is for poorly rendered alien faces (which, to be fair, look like PS3 graphics and oddly stick out compared to so much of the better effects in the film). That is only the tip of the iceberg.

 

Because the final 10 minutes might be some of the most egregious sequel setups of all time. Not even in a fun way. It introduces entirely new plot lines, new thematic concepts around destiny and fate, and leaves none of the story or narrative of the previous 2 hours feeling finished. I was astounded. 

 

Granted, the film has received plenty of praise from critics and audiences for its audacity and its wild-ass storytelling, but Hope left me feeling fairly befuddled as its end credits rolled. On one hand, the action sequences are incredible. They are brilliantly constructed blends of CGI, stunts, performances, tone, and pacing. The cast is absolutely eating scenery throughout, including a raucous role for Zo In-sung as the head hunter in the woods who, despite being thrown around like a rag doll and beaten to a pulp, will not die. I’ll even give Na Hong-jin credit for knowing his tropes and for pulling the rug out on his audience with setups and payoffs. 

 

Still, for all that, Hope feels disjointed, with no real layering beneath the spectacle. These characters feel like hollow doppelgangers of real people; the script has no clear thematic thread, and the places, people, and things feel utterly disconnected from any reality - even the one built in the film. Part of me feels like all of this is intentional. Na Hong-jin is the kind of provocative filmmaker who bucks tropes for a good twist, embeds dark comedy or satire in his films, and has no problem rejecting the most convenient path to an end.

 

Could he be, in his own loving way, mocking the Hollywood spectacle sci-fi actioner? Maybe. In the end, though, compared to the razor-sharp balancing act and execution of his previous films, Hope feels like it would rather cozy up to the Paul W. S. Anderson and Michael Bay world of hollowed-out spectacle rather than find a way to use it as something more. 

 

Written By Matt Malpica Reifschneider