a review of 汉江怪物

2020 Cult Movie Challenge Week 37: Kaiju Week Finally revisiting the first Bong Joon-ho movie that I and probably most Americans saw, and I think now that I'm more familiar with his work it clicked for me in a way that it didn't necessarily do the first time out. I remember being impressed with it as an original take on the kaiju genre at the time, but was less enamored of the off-kilter family comedy/drama aspects and didn't really see the applicability to Korean (or for that matter Western) politics. And now that I've seen a lot more by Bong and understand how important both the weird shaggy-dog storytelling and political themes are to his work, I feel like I understood what both of those were doing a lot better this time out. I'd also forgotten that there was an entire disease-pandemic subplot with people in the streets wearing masks (and doing it all just as wrong as 2020 Americans), which made this an interesting rewatch for this point in time.