Korean blockbuster on ancient naval battle crosses the Yellow Sea

The highest-grossing film in Korean history is noticeably bad.

More than a third of South Korea's 51.2 million residents have watched "The Admiral: Roaring Currents" (in Korean, “Myeongryang” [“명량”]) a melodramatic blockbuster released earlier this year. In the New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg described it as a CGI-aided, David-and-Goliath battle flick staged “with a nationalistic fervor.”

That nationalism may be unintelligible to foreigners, but it’s powerfully felt in Korea. Following April’s Sewol ferry tragedy, the film came to embody a rebuke of corruption-tainted leaders like the AWOL captain and embattled President Park Geun-hye. To a lesser extent, “The Admiral” stands as an indictment of Japanese aggression in the context of renewed militarization, a contested colonial history and enduring territorial disputes.

Japan, perennially starved for land, claims to own the Takeshima islets, which Korea claims as Dokdo. The ancient fight over the Senkaku (Japanese), or Diaoyu (Chinese), islands in the East China Sea is better known and more contentious. 

Yet on Friday, just days before the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, China and Japan agreed to a temporary détente over the islands each nation claims in the East China Sea. The message was clear: History can wait; free trade cannot.

Chinese citizens may have a different opinion and now have the chance to watch Japanese defeat play out on screen, in a certain Korean film. “The Admiral” is set to open in 3,000 theaters in China before the end of the year.

The movie depicts a 16th-century battle on the maritime boundary of Joseon, the feudal Korean kingdom (1392-1897). It’s a pre-modern universe ruled by danger and chance, domestic privation and international conflict.

The kingdom’s military leaders — aided by scraggly, low-caste spies — get word of a Japanese invasion.  Ground forces being what they are, navy General Yi Sun-shin (played by Choi Min-sik, star of the revenge film “Old Boy”) prepares a fleet manned by impoverished conscripts and patriotic volunteers.

Everyone thinks it’s a suicide mission: a dozen rickety ships versus imperial Japan’s bevy of immaculate floating tanks. To make matters worse, Joseon’s only turtle boat, a "high-tech" armored warship, burns down.

And yet, against these apparently insurmountable odds, there is a happy ending. Through mastery of the seas and sheer force of will (shown cinematically through repeated furrowed-brow close-ups), General Yi repels the enemy and steers his men to victory. “The king should follow the people,” he says or writes in calligraphic solitude over and over again.

Most Koreans understand that “The Admiral” is cheesy bombast. But throughout the summer, they couldn't get enough. They flocked to movie theaters, showing after showing, in an act of communal catharsis. General Yi was the kind of leader they needed and the antithesis of what they had: a ferry captain who, in April, abandoned hundreds of teenagers on a sinking boat, and an out-of-touch president unresponsive to public outrage.

As “The Admiral” hits the Chinese market, its meaning may evolve. Will the selfless General Yi become the PRC’s new hero, all that President Xi Jinping is not? APEC deals notwithstanding, could it reignite animosity toward Prime Minister Abe and Japan's military-first platform? Or will its message, tinged as it is with “nationalistic fervor,” fall flat (as it did in the U.S., where the film made just over $150,000 opening weekend)? 

Whatever the case, it is a blockbuster with a long tail — 417 years to be precise.