The Good The Bad The Weird

Situated in Manchuria during the Japanese colonial period, the film the good the bad and the weird portrays three Koreans in their adventurous and often violent journey in order to find and keep a treasure map. In correlance to the short story ‘Escape’, the main characters in the film also run away from their homeland, Korea, to find a better life and ‘escape’ from abject poverty. Similar to Korea during the Japanese colonial period, Manchuria was also a place that was ambivalent in terms of its national identity. Thus, their escape to Manchuria insinuates their constant fight and striving to ‘escape’ from poverty as well as their inability to settle down as a result of their homeland being ruled by another country. 

While their own country is ruled by another country, their rights and the enforced laws and rules are often indifferent towards the well-being of the citizens(mostly peasants) and many suffer from poverty, which eventually leads to peasants like Taegoo to move to Manchuria. Therefore, while laws are perhaps what keeps humans to stay moral, during colonization, laws aren’t really laws and their ‘skills in handling the guns’ and/or finding treasure is the optimal choice to sustain their living. In the film, the extremely violent and gory images show not only the value of money but also their desperate desire to ‘escape’ from poverty. Without much answers in solving the issue of poverty, both the short story and the film shows that to them, violence was one of the only/best choice to stay out of poverty(joining a rebel group in the case of the short story). The film also shows the numerous problems that the colonial period resulted in, such as making inappropriate laws, thus, disregarding the peasants and leading them to even worse poverty. 

Without the use of CG, the director the grand landscape of Manchuria, which resulted in Western-cowboy-movie-like film. Although the movie was quite long, the use of comic genre and action is perhaps what allowed the movie to be commercially successful.

Overall, both the movie and the short story effectively reflected the main characters’ situations dying the colonial period, where they were ‘strangled by poverty in a hostile environment, which made them transform {themselves} into a rebel prone to committing acts of crime and violence’.