[Review] Along With The Gods: The Two Worlds (5.5/10)

After getting some recommendations for Along With The Gods: The Two Worlds, I finally decided to check what the hype is all about.

And I get why people enjoyed this movie so much, but if you were to take just one step back, this movie was mired with gigantic plot holes.

Written and directed by Kim Yong Hwa, it started off so well setting up the universe and the rules like the seven judgments and process of reincarnation.

Everything went very well in the first half hour and I thought this could be very emotional at the end, like what everyone had been talking about.

I enjoyed all the actors and their characters. The three guardians felt like they were from a manga series. Cha Tae Hyun was the first main actor in my first Korean movie, My Sassy Girl and he can do drama and humour very well. Ha Jung Woo was the grounded leader. Kim Hyang Gi was the cute and warm one. And Ju Ji Hun brought the humour and slightly pulled faces. But all four of them shared equal amounts of the limelight and never overacted, which I thought was good work by director Kim.

But once the second half started and Kim somehow decided to abandon the process of going through the rest of the seven judgements and started "messing with the real world", that was when I lost interest. And they set up the rule that if the real world was being changed by a guardian, the place of judgement will try to kill them. But sometimes that manifested as monsters, and sometimes it was the weather. I would have appreciated a bit more consistency here because, having shot everything in front of a green screen, every scene became a spectacle with special effects that did not compliment the storyline.

And it took such a long time with the brother's plot points to set up the big finish that I did not feel it was justified. A lot of scenes could be cut or cut shorter in order to have a tighter movie, but as it was it felt like there was just too much going on and very unnecessarily so.

Also, that big finish that everyone was talking about, it felt very manipulative. Every word in that whole dialogue was written with the sole purpose of making the audience cry, but it actually was not written to conclude the story. It was done so badly that all the rules that were setup before were thrown out the window just so that dialogue could happen; because Cha's character main purpose of wanting to be reincarnated was so that he could jump into a dream of a person still living. So how did that ending happen the way it did?

And I had a big issue about one judgement being "deceit" and yet as a guardian, Ha's character was going around telling lies to everyone!

This movie had such a promising concept and a first half, only to be destroyed by its own incompetence in following the rules of the universe it has set up for itself.