Blue Seagull

Blue Seagull is a collection of things that happen in sequence, and I'm pretty sure that some of them are connected to each other. This is a movie that is bad. On basically every level it is bad. The best part of the movie is probably the animation, which I would describe as "charmingly primitive." Characters are semi-competently designed, in that they are very distinguishable, and while the whole thing is rife with awkward stilted action, it's not that much worse than a lot of shows it was contemporary with. On regular occasions, the program switches to the kind of CGI that wouldn't look out ofplace as a tech demo for the Sega Saturn. Not only are these scenes incredibly dated and ugly, they often serve no point to the story other than to communicate things like "this girl drives her car to work" and "the police exist" and "the animators aren't really sure what the difference is between New York City and Las Vegas." The story is very unfocused. Nothing ever really feels like it connects to anything that came before it. Ha-il just sort of meanders his way from place to place, until it's time for the Die-Hard style siege on a mafia stronghold. It's a very "and now for something completely different" style of storytelling. Not helping is the fact that the only version of this movie I could find had possibly the worst subtitles I'd ever seen. Half the time, they didn't even form a coherent sentence, let alone tell me anything about what was happening. They were so bad they actually wrapped around to being funny, at points. Despite all its flaws, I found myself kind of low-key enjoying this movie. There's a sort of doofy earnestness to the whole production. The CGI sequences, as laughably bad as they seem in the modern day, are lavishly presented, as if the people who made them were just so proud of what they could do with their computers. The end credits are full of B-roll footage of all the people who worked on the film, being the very hardest workers, in their cramped little studio full of posters they made of the movie they were currently working on. The film is loaded with product placement for Korean brands like Daewoo and Samsung, which makes me think that there's an undercurrent of patriotism. As if this movie about a handsome, hyper-competent Korean stud travelling to America to recover the sacred treasure of Korea from the American Mafia *might* have been trying to play to its audience, just a tad. Overall, I would say Blue Seagull is bad, but it's not irredemably bad. It's boring and incoherent at times, but it has a certain charm about it. I give it a Daewoo out of ten.

Well, that was surely an experience. Review: Story/Plot/Writing: It revolves around the protagonist trying to get back a sword from his great grandfather or something and later on he also has to save this one chick. For some reason this action film also has numerous sex scenes throughout it and in my opinion I think they were really pointless and contributed nothing of value to the narrative, they were just there. The dialogue is very boring as well. Characters: Nothing notable about them. Their only purpose was to progress whatever story this film had forward. They aren't deep enough to get the viewer to root for them, orcare for them either. Art/Animation: The art looks mediocre, and the animation is really lacking. Loops are often used in many scenes throughout the film and it can be a bit jarring at times. Another weird thing to take note of are the few moments where the people switch to a western cartoony art style, like the men in the stripper scene. It makes this film inconsistent and feels unnecessary, especially considering that this is supposed to be an action film, one with sex scenes at that! But do you want to know what's truly jarring? The CGI in this film! It looks terrible, and completely threw me off-guard and ruined my immersion! Combine this with the agitating, bizarre camera movements and you get CG scenes that are very disorienting. Why did they do this? The film could have worked well without it! What were they thinking? Sound/Music: The voice acting was really bad, and the music is nothing special. Overall: I was bored out of my mind watching this film, the credits showing the behind the scenes was way more interesting than the plot! I swear I was about to fall asleep at one point. Blue Seagull is a strange piece of Korean media, one that has faded into obscurity, and deservingly so (no offense to the production team). 1.7/10 Rounded to 2/10 for MAL score.

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