#Alive: A recap
HI. I AM JANE.
I am a self-certified K-Drama fan, even if I do say so myself, but from time to time, I dip my feet into the waters of K-movies for instant gratification with rich stories.
For clarity sake, let me state that I am not a fan of zombies, so being a fan of movies based on them is even further down the line. What drew me to this movie was the cast. Park Shin Hye and Yoo Ah In are among some of my all-time favorite actors.
#Alive is a 2020 zombie film which centers around a man, Oh Jun-woo and a woman, Kim Yoo-bin, as they struggle to stay alive in a world infested with zombies. The movie opens with our male lead, Oh Jun-woo, alone at home. He is a gamer and is online with some of his gaming friends when he first hears about the strange disease that causes infected people to eat and bite uninfected people thereby infecting them. He turns on the TV to find out that every news is about the disease. He sees pandemonium breaking out when he looks outside, people are all running; some away and others, unknowingly and rather unfortunately, to the zombies.
Our male lead foolishly (if I might inject) opens his door only for a strange man to come rushing in. The man tries to convince Jun-woo of his identity by telling him his house number and proceeds to confirm if he was alone at home. Soon after he starts twitching, Jun-woo sensing something wrong tries to get him out of the house. The man is very reluctant and pleads with Jun-woo to at least let him use his toilet. When he comes out of the toilet, his eyes are bloodshot, and it seems his transformation is almost complete. Jun-woo barely manages to get him out of his house to avoid getting eaten.
Jun-woo smartens up and barricades the door with the refrigerator. He then tries severally to reach his family but all to no avail. When he eventually receives a message from his mother assuring him of their safety and urging him to stay home, he calms down a little. He tries to ration the snacks at home, but this is very difficult as they were little to begin with.
The entire internet, as Jun-woo soon finds out, is filled with people asking about their loved ones and putting up addresses under the #Alive. Jun-woo puts up a similar post. He also comes across a disturbing video of a rather stupid young man, who is hanging outside the terrace of a multiple story building with his phone attached to a selfie stick in a bid to get a signal. This is because most telecommunication facilities had been destroyed by the zombies. The “stupid” young man excitedly gets a signal only to lose it soon after, he then tiptoes, loses his footing and falls into the arms of eagerly waiting zombies.
Determined to be a bit smarter, our tech-savvy lead, attaches his phone to a drone. With his drone, he gets to see that most if not all the occupants of the apartment complex he lives in are now zombies. He stops his survey when he sees that his battery is now low. With nothing else left to do, Jun-woo falls asleep. He wakes up to strange noises and looks outside only to see a policewoman being torn to bits by fellow police officers now turned zombies.
In yet another foolish move, Jun-woo attempts to scare off the zombies nearly 100 meters away by yelling at them. This, of course, does nothing to scare them off but it attracts the attention of a zombie close to his house. The zombie manages to enter his house by pushing open his door alongside the refrigerator. It seems the disease also equips them with supernatural strength. He barely manages to trick the zombie into jumping out the window. Although he is unharmed, it seems that his encounter with the zombie has further reduced his ration as the little food in the fridge have all found their way to the floor.
The next morning, it seems breakfast is his father’s liquor. Jun-woo smartly seals off the entire terrace. While eating, the last noodles in the house, he accidentally knocks over the last bottle of water leaving the entire house devoid of water. His attempt to listen to the radio on his phone is foiled when he cannot get any wired earphones to serve as an antenna, all his earphones are wireless.
Jun-woo seems a little crazy or maybe just drunk as he hallucinates reuniting with his family. Waking up from the hallucination, he is left very sad. He gets a call from his mother, but the signal is so bad he barely hears a thing. He then pulls the stunt the stupid young man on the internet had pulled earlier. Luckily, he doesn’t fall into the crowd of zombies waiting for him, but he clearly hears that something is not quite right with his family.
In his anger, he breaks things in his home and goes outside (Jun-woo keeps impressing me with his foolishness). There, he sees a zombie that is surprisingly slow, and he takes out his anger on the zombie using a golf club, urging others to come. Not too long after he is nearly swamped in a sea of zombies (talk about answered prayers, right?). He shockingly manages to get to his house alive and then decides that it was time to take his life (which for me is the height of his foolishness).
As he dangles from the noose he has tied, a laser beam projects into his house from the apartment across. The beam points to the word NO on the writing on the wall. He struggles with the noose until he is freed and watches the beam. The beam then points to different alphabets on the writings on the wall to spell the word, IDIOT (someone is finally saying it) and this is how we meet our female lead.
Our female lead, Kim Yoo-bin, seems to have been watching Jun-woo with a pair of binoculars. When Jun-woo, now freed from the noose, sees her, he waves to her excitedly. She waves back and gestures that they meet again by 7’o clock. We are then able to take a look at the home of our female lead. Unlike Jun-woo, she seems very arranged and has reorganized her house into booby traps for zombies. Jun-woo wakes up by 11 o’clock as against the 7 o’clock they had previously agreed on. He gestures his apology and then projects his name on his phone. She reciprocates. After a brief attempt to communicate, they agree to meet by 7 o’clock. She hears a sound and attempts to find the source. It seems one of her traps had trapped a zombie that made its way into her house, she proceeds to axe its head off.
The next morning, at the agreed upon time, Yoo-bin attempts to pass food over to Jun-woo when she sees that he is hungry. She attaches a rope to a baseball and throws it across hoping it gets into his home. The ball doesn’t make it. Jun-woo then uses his drone to deliver a rope to Yoo-bin. Compared to Jun-woo, our female lead seems more analog. Using the rope bridge, she passes him a container of snacks and a bottle of water. The ball with the rope that failed to make it across, seems to have become a ladder for one of the zombies to climb up to Yoo-bin’s house. Jun-woo gestures this to her and attempts to distract the zombie by flying his drone close to it. The zombie destroys the drone in fury which gives Yoo-bin enough time to axe off the hand of the zombie leading him (or it) to fall several stories down.
Jun-woo goes to the other houses in search of food and is able to get a wired earphone, two walkie-talkies and some food before he runs into some zombies and has to flee back home. He sends back the container Yoo-bin gave him with some food and the walkie-talkie.
With the talkies, they eventually start to truly communicate. While they talk, Jun-woo asks Yoo-bin to bring out basins as he can hear heavy sounds and thinks it’s raining. They look out the terraces, but it’s not raining. Instead they see a multitude of zombies running into both apartment complexes simultaneously. They both lie low and try to stay silent until Yoo-bin accidentally knocks over a shelf in her house. She prepares to leave as she knows she would soon be swamped with zombies. She informs Jun-woo that her destination is the 8th floor of his apartment complex which, as she had earlier noticed, was empty. They both agree to go up.
Yoo-bin gives some absolute girl crush vibes as she jumps out of the terrace of her house and runs towards the apartment complex across axe swinging. Jun-woo runs out to help her and they both narrowly miss being swamped by zombies as they enter the elevator to the 8th floor.
All is peaceful on the 8th floor, but this is lasts about a second before they are swamped with zombies again. A man opens his door and quickly pulls them in before they get eaten. He seems kind and offers them food while telling them of a rescue team that he has seen come around.
They are overjoyed but it seems their joy is short lived as they soon discover that the food was laced with drugs. Yoo-bin wakes up to being zip tied and dragged to a room. It seems the man is planning to offer her as a meal to his wife now turned zombie. Jun-woo and Yoo-bin both struggle and in the process the man is bit by his wife and Yoo-bin fires a gun to protect herself from getting bit too, but this only draws the attention of more zombies. Seeing the end so close, they decide to shoot themselves instead of getting bit. Just before they pull the trigger, they hear the rescue choppers.
With hope rekindled in them, they struggle so hard to make it to the rooftop of the apartment, only to find the chopper no longer in sight. The zombies find their way to the rooftop too and they gradually creep closer and closer. Just when they are about to be swamped by the zombies, the military appear in the chopper and shoot at the zombies while helping them into the chopper. Jun-woo receives a message from his family assuring him of their safety, he looks towards Yoo-bin and they are both glad to be alive.
#Alive is a very gory movie, as should be expected of a zombie film but it helps us see the differences between the zombies in Korean movie industry and those of Hollywood. Korean zombies are, for one, unbelievably fast. #Alive also compares survival behaviors. The behavior of our tech-savvy but incredibly foolish male lead and our analog styled yet incredibly brave female lead. #Alive offers lovers of zombie movies a good taste of the Korean version, but this group of zombie movie lovers I assure you does not include me.
Thank you.
