Project Silence

The South Koreans are masters at making riveting and vicious crime dramas and action thrillers. I have been binge watching them for months now, BUT this is not one of those great Korean movies, this is actually below average...

The bad: the special effects look silly. The attacking dogs are meant to be frightening looking, but they actually look laughable, because of cheap CGI. The WHOLE plot of this movie, the WHOLE core of this movies' existence goes down the drain, because these wild dogs look so incredibly SILLY and fake.

NO thrill. NO riveting action. NO good drama or acting. NO jokes. This is quite bad for Korean movie standards. Not a total flop for sure, but way below what they are capable of producing in South Korea. Such a pity!

Literally this movie is just a bunch of CGI dogs running on a bridge and people acting hysterically. For the genre, it was poorly executed, seemed more focused on the CGI than the story and the action. I was bored out of my mind, as it completely did not resonate with me at all. I don't care about the characters and the actions sequences were predictable and cliche, bereft of any creativity or excitement.

For a Korean film, this is an extreme disappointment as Koreans are excellent in making movies that really move the heart, either in comedy or tragedy. I kinda wish they did zombies instead of dogs.

Obviously a riff on the dog eat dog quote ... so no pun intended. This is a "catastrophe movie" (if you remember or have seen some of them way back in the day, mostly in the 70s and maybe 80s, though coming back from time to time, San Andreas one of the "newer" ones) ... packed with some bite ... I mean dogs, to spice things up ... not in a eating them ... I won't even go there with a joke ... especially because the dogs are the ones attacking.

The story is quite paper thin ... but there is one side character ... when he is introduced I didn't really like him ... he is quite sleazy and tries to rip our main character off ... but later he becomes a really fun comical character who almost single-handedly saves the movie.

Characters doing stuff that does not make much sense ... but suspend your disbelief and you'll be good I reckon ... this is about having fun with a ridiculous idea ... nothing more, nothing less.

How much you enjoy the movie will depend on how willingly you believe and accept the CGI dog pack. I was slightly put off by it. And Jodie's dad. And that one girl's dad - the main actor in the film. They were very one note in their characterization. But I was willing to suspend my disbelief for the entirety of the movie running time.

Although $64.40 is the new $2. For all you Savage Steve Holland fans out there.

Anyway. There is lots of tension on the bridge with some fairly minimal backstories that play into nifty plot points. Like the golfer thing. That was a nice callback.

I would watch this again.

I watched this earlier today and i thought it was REALLY GOOD! Unlike movies like Train To Busan, where i genuinely was invested in/cared about several of the characters, Project Silence's main flaw is that it barely had me caring about most of the characters due to the shallow writing (character-wise).

But as a roller coaster/popcorn, not too heavy, fun action/thriller it's definitely a solid movie. The cinematography/visuals and atmosphere/tension is very good and much to my surprise the CGI fx for the dogs was pretty good! Lord knows i HATE bad CGI monsters/creatures in movies and in this movie they did a good job!