[HanCinema's Film Review] "Phantom the Submarine"

Well this certainly is a Korean movie about a submarine. I don't mean to sound flippant here but that's really all that can be meaningfully written about "Phantom the Submarine". If you've ever seen any movie about a submarine, "Phantom the Submarine" is that same movie. You've got a large cast of characters stuck in horribly cramped quarters, an unsettling mystery about what the submarine's actual mission is, and a mutiny.

Advertisement

Is that a spoiler? It takes some time for the mutiny to actually happen, and come to think of it I'm still not totally sure who was supposed to be mutinying against who there, since it's never totally clear what the original mission even was or whether even the characters themselves have any real idea what's going on. But really, isn't it inevitable? It's not like somebody's going to come in and board the submarine so that our plucky crew would have to defend themselves. Among other things this movie doesn't really have a clearly defined enemy.

That might sound like negative criticism, but again, this is a submarine movie. Director Min Byeong-cheon at least seems to have that much down clearly. The environment of the titular submarine is dark and claustrophobic. This is a frankly miserable place that could conceivably be likened to hell, particularly given that all the characters are technically supposed to be dead. No, I'm pretty sure the submarine isn't literally hell, given the stakes involved in the climax. A bit of a pity, really, since that kind of allegorical twist could put some much needed emotional originality behind the typical tropes of a submarine story.

To the contrary, "Phantom the Submarine" is all about style over substance. Aside from just being cramped, any given room of the submarine only seems to be lit up in only one color. It's hard to appreciate just how amazing it is that we humans are capable of processing several different colors at once until a film comes up and takes away that ability just to demonstrate that, geez, submarines kind of stink, what with their one color per room limit. I would not want to spend a lot of time in a submarine.

This feeling is only heightened when we get to more violent scenes. The men on this submarine are brutal, violent people whose temperment in the heat of hand-to-hand combat is well-suited to the suffocating environment that the submarine atmosphere evokes. This is what I mean about it never really being clear what the submarine's mission actually is. Even if a clearly defined mission exists, it could be seen as inevitable that a crew of men with nothing to lose would defy that mission to do whatever it is the higher-ups actually want them to do, in a game of ludicrously complicated fourth dimensional chess.

The trouble with "Phantom the Submarine" is that it's just not as exciting as analytical descriptions make it sound. Some readers may really love submarine movies, just can't get enough of the tight paranoia the genre seems to evoke. But I imagine that many other readers have no special emotional affectation toward submarines or submarine movies at all. To that reader, I have to be honest. This is not the movie to kindle a lifelong passion for submarines in your heart. "Phantom the Submarine" is exactly what it appears to be. Nothing more, and nothing less.

Review by William Schwartz

"Phantom the Submarine" is directed by Min Byeong-cheon and features Choi Min-soo, Jung Woo-sung and Yoon Joo-sang.

 

Avaialble on DVD from YESASIA