Pandora is a Korean disaster film about an earthquake that triggers a meltdown in a nuclear power plant.
I skimmed Netflix the other day and decided to give this a watch. Pandora is made in South Korea and was written and directed by Park Jung-woo. It’s very clearly influenced by the 2011 Fukishima disaster, and likely Chernobyl as well. Really it seems to draw most of its influence from the more recent Japan incident though. Much of the film feels like more of a hypothetical “this could happen” rather than a broad high concept type disaster flick.
The film mainly follows Jae-hyeok Kang, a power plant worker who lives locally with his family. He’s portrayed as something of a lazy slacker. He lives in his mother’s restaurant and has little going for him outside of a girlfriend who he doesn’t seem all that invested in. He has a lot of contempt towards the power plant he works in and has plans to leave the country. By all accounts, it seems like he’s having something of a midlife crisis.
An earthquake hits, which causes disaster as a sequence of events mainly including negligence, incompetence and shortcuts leads to a full nuclear meltdown and an explosion at the reactor. From there, the film darts back and forth between the workers at ground zero (as well as Jae-hyeok), the plant managers, the local civilians and to the government officials panicking to contain the disaster. To me, the most interesting part of the film was watching the political side of it more than anything. They established that the country had a relatively young president, but an older and more controlling prime minister who attempts to take over the incident and make decisions without the president, whilst the president loses confidence in himself after making some bad decisions.
There’s a bit of action here and there, but the movie is really more about the drama of these events on the locals. There’s very obvious commentary on issues such as the use of nuclear power (duh) as well as shady government politics. It’s made clear that most of the events really come down to incompetence and negligence, which somewhat reflects real life incidents.
The interesting thing is the writing of the main character, Jae-hyeok. He isn’t necessarily a genius or the bravest man in the world, he’s not your stereotypical protagonist. He’s an every man, and he also doesn’t want to die. He is not okay with dying a horrible death in the power plant, even if circumstances may dictate that he must. He tearfully asks what he did to deserve this, saying that he doesn’t want to die like this. It’s emotional and really makes you feel awful for him, and his colleagues. It’s something that you generally wouldn’t see from the typical Hollywood movie where the protagonist would avoid showing emotion or fear, or if they do, it’s only in glimpses. Jae-hyeok wears his heart on his sleeve.
The drama does get ladled on quite thick, to the point that it’s almost exhausting. It did get to a point where it almost became just over the top and went from being dramatic to full on melodramatic for a while. But the performances are all great, there’s a broad range of different characters and overall it’s well made piece that feels a little too authentic in places when it comes to comparing it to real life tragedies like Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island etc.
Rating: ★★★1/2
Zero Stars 