In Carter, the Korean action movie recently released by Netflix, there is no braking. From the moment it opens with a divine look at a bus driving down a city street, to the moment the titular amnesiac character played by Joo Won is awakened by CIA agents pointing guns at his face, to Carter who anyone in its path with unrelenting energy and creativity, the film consistently maintains a speed that few films would attempt. It sometimes runs out of place — like when characters have to enter, put on an exhibit, and leave — but it never rests.
I was first warned about director Jung Byung-gil’s fourth full-length feature via a tweet featuring one of Carter’s early action sequences, in which our hero rides a moped through the narrow streets of Seoul as unseen villains attempt to attack him. This scene was eye-catching and emphasized the film’s unique aesthetic, which borrows from one-take films like Rope, Birdman, and 1917, but takes away any sense of slickness. As Carter drives past a window, the camera flies through it to follow, constantly zooming in and out at a fast pace. Byung-gil maintains this throughout the entire 132-minute film length. The entire movie is shot in oners and pseudo-oners, stitched together like an adrenaline junkie Frankenstein’s monster.
As I watched, I couldn’t get over how similar Carter’s story felt to the one I’ve played in games dozens of times. Once Carter wakes up, he’s already in action and spends the rest of the movie fleeing bad guys and/or running towards a concrete target. As he runs, a voice in his ear instructs him where to go. There’s no end to how many henchmen his opponents have to throw at him, so wherever he goes, a wave of enemies is ready to crash on top of him. This is a movie that feels like it was built with action scenes in mind, then reverse engineered into a story. Action movies are sometimes made that way. When Jackie Chan directed Police Story, he first found interesting locations and then worked out a story. And Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie asks Paramount what shots they need to sell the movie, then builds the rest of the movie around those supplies.
While there is a precedent, this is not how most movies are made. Usually a screenwriter writes a script, a producer defends it, a director or star signs, and the technicalities – like finding locations – then fall into place. Action movies are sometimes the exception, because what everyone can see (the action) is more important than the writing that connects it. In that way, action movies are a lot like many triple-A video games in which programmers, level designers and performers start work early and a writer often comes in late. There are plenty of games that involved writers from the get-go, but at least as often the writer comes in late to work his way back into a connective tissue of the story.
Carter also feels like a video game in the way it tries to make us empathize with its main character. Although Carter is a killing machine without remembering who he is, the filmmakers give him a daughter he can’t remember who is perilously close to succumbing to a zombie-like virus, and they leave him halfway through a child, Ha. – na, save. through the movie. For the rest of the run, Carter not only tries to survive, he also works to protect one vulnerable child and tries to save another.
The Last of Us and God of War are both better than Carter, who throws so much hyperactively shot action at your face so quickly and without delay that it doesn’t take long to go completely numb to it. But both games used the same playbook. Take a gruff, violent protagonist, saddle him up with a kid to care for, and watch him remember that life can be more than bullets, knives, and/or bloody knuckles. Carter throws two kids into the mix and hopes it works, but the lead is such a coding that it can’t quite hold the landing.
Instead, it serves as a reminder of the concessions movies make when they try to be more like video games. Carter chooses to tell his story through exhibition spaces, but you don’t have to, unlike many video games. The assumption that video games often start with — that you’ll be with this character in real time as they make their way through a contiguous series of obstacles — isn’t necessary in film. And in fact, it takes a hacksaw for the grammar that movies have developed over the past century and have changed with little benefit. Carter’s opening hour (at most) is compelling in the same way as a good game, but it gives way to the slog of a bad game in the second half. Carter made me wish I could put the controller down.
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