During the Vietnamese war a Korean military base receives a distress transmission from one of their units stationed at a strategically important location known as R-point. The grim message relays that the unit is under attack, soldiers are dying and assistance is desperately needed, but the base members just listen in shock and horror. This is because the unit in question went missing at R-point no less than six months ago and the one person who survived the ordeal was left horribly burned and screaming deliriously that his squadron was slaughtered by an unknown enemy, not the Viet Cong. If the soldier is telling the truth, then who is sending these distress signals?
To answer this question the military call in First Lieutenant Choi (Gam Wu-seong), a decorated soldier who has garnered a reputation that trouble follows him on whatever mission he takes. He is assigned a platoon of rag-tag soldiers, seemingly plucked from the local whorehouses and loaded with syphilis. Not exactly the kind of bunch you want to take into such a mysterious mission, but seeing as the official line is that they’re going to R-point merely to investigate the whereabouts of a missing unit, no-one suspects that the crew are deeply under prepared for what is about to face them. However, when they arrive at their destination, they uncover an old stone tablet with an inscription stating that many years ago, Chinese soldiers slaughtered innocent Vietnamese and built a temple above their graves. The tablet then reveals a harsh warning: If you enter this consecrated ground with blood on your hands then you will never be able to leave. Choi’s squad is about to discover that this is no idle threat….
R-point is most effective if you know next to nothing about the set up because it relies heavily on the ambiguity of the situation the soldiers find themselves in, so with this in mind I’ve tried to reveal as little of the details as I need to. What I will say is that there isn’t really anything particularly original about R-point at all. If you stripped the film down into its raw genre components then you’ll soon find that almost every aspect has been Xeroxed from many other films across various genres. This isn’t to say R-point is a poor film though; in fact it’s a very slick horror that rattles pleasantly by and is filled with suspense, thanks mainly to Gong Su-chang’s direction. He thoroughly understands the golden rule of horror: what you don’t see is far worse than what you do. He tantalizes rather than reveals, gradually building the tension up and up then letting fly with a sequence of rapid, moody set pieces rather than just one simple fright. It’s a technique that works really well, R-point isn’t a particularly scary film, but it is a tense, creepy one.
In order to achieve the right look for the film, Gong did some extensive research into the Vietnamese countryside and this pays off spectacularly, with the location shooting deeply intensifying the eerie ambience. The islet the platoon reconnoitre is a dank, sodden hellhole and R-point itself a dreary, dilapidated construction that just oozes character. From the moment it appears on screen you just know its history is unpleasant, but if by any chance you fail to notice this, the script and Dal Palan’s effective, if rather overbearing, score will help fill in the blanks. The Writer/Director has also carefully incorporated the various conflicts that hit Vietnam prior to this one – like the French Indochina War, allowing him to play around with some foreshadowing and introduce some much needed exposition to establish the story. Likewise the old chestnut of consecrated ground being laid over the bodies of the dead never fails to unsettle.
As a simple chiller R-point works very well, as anything else it falters because there’s just not enough depth to the characters or the representation of the Vietnamese war. Each member of the platoon has a distinct personality and all the actors perform well in their respective roles, but ultimately they are a collection of war-movie clichés. There’s a fresh-faced naïve youngster, a loud mouth wannabe-romeo braggart, a family man with little battle experience, a hardnosed by-the-book sergeant and a coolheaded but jaded lieutenant – if you’ve seen Oliver Stone’s Platoon then I’m sure you’ll be familiar with the soldiers in this film. The most interesting of the bunch are the team leaders, Sergeant Jin and Lieutenant Choi. They’re the only two who know the true history behind the mission and both share contrasting approaches to their job. Jin is a tough son of a bitch, aggressive and hard lined with a formidable reputation as being something of a killing machine on the battlefield. Choi on the other hand is much more easygoing and an eternal loner, always distancing himself from the group. He’s obviously disillusioned by the war, and so jaded that he seems permanently numb, maintaining cool composure in even the wildest events that occur around him. The advantage of this blasé nature is that he’s the fastest to cotton onto what’s really behind the disappearances at R-point. But that’s all we really get to know about our protagonist, Gong never really divulges more about the character then this simple bit of characterisation.
There is a clear message within the film that war is merely a repetitive cycle of death, we also get brief glimpses into the characters of the soldiers away from the mission via expository dialogue and flashbacks throughout the film, but this doesn’t help stave the feeling that R-Point is just the same-old, same-old war movie. Maybe some of the plot twists could lend themselves well to allegorical interpretations, but I’ll leave that to the film scholars to decide. I’m happy enough simply enjoying the film on face value alone, as a good old-fashioned popcorn frightener.
Arpointeu.2004.720p.BluRay.AVC-mfcorrea.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 47mn
Size: 6.76 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 1280x698
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 7 500 Kbps
BPP: 0.350
Audio
#1: Korean 5.1ch DTS @ 1 509 Kbps (Surround)
https://nitro.download/view/5B64F9BD9EC0E9B/Arpointeu.2004.720p.BluRay.AVC-mfcorrea.mkv
Language(s):English, Korean, French, Vietnamese
Subtitles:German, English