Taegugki: The Brotherhood of War

                Taegugki: The Brotherhood of War (2004), in giving a “more balanced approach than earlier anticommunist films,” (Kim 303) the ultimate feeling that the film leaves us with is that there are only survivors, no winners or heroes. Despite the uplifting ending where the children are “somehow thriving and sanguine despite the utter devastation all around them, re-inscribes the film with a nationalist ending,” (Kim 306) I am not left with the feeling that the nation will blossom anew, as Kim is suggesting the end scene presents. Part of that optimistic ending is that Jin Seok (Won Bin) is re-united with his mother and says that he too will go to school. However, we see that fifty years later he is still grieving over his brother and obsessed with finding him. When he takes out the shoes that Jin Tae (Jang Dong-gun) had intended to give him, they are shiny and polished. So clearly they have not just been left there until this moment. His granddaughter, as the elderly Jin Seok gets ready to leave for the war site, mentions that last time he got sick trying to look for Jin Tae. The fact that there was a last time, and it certainly does not seem like last time was his first effort to find Jin Tae, shows that he has sacrificed his time and health over and over again in this search—unable to move on despite the optimistic expectation. In that case, Taegugki is more successful at showing the post-armistice division consciousness than Kim concludes with because what I left with at the end of the film was that people should be relieved, they should be happy—and they even act it, but in the end everyone is left with a part of them that cannot move on. Even the granddaughter cannot move on from the war because she has to see her grandfather go through all this and assist him in his search. So what had the possibility to be positive ended up disheartening, just like Jin Tae’s attempt to get his brother out of the war, Jin Seok going to see his family where Kim Young-shin (Lee Eun-joo) gets arrestest, and Jin Seok’s long search for his brother.