2009 Lost Memories



I think there are a bunch of filmmakers sitting around Korea watching American blockbusters. “Look at that!” they say. “See how Hollywood can take a clever concept and bury it under an avalanche of pointless action scenes just to make a few bucks?”

“We could do that!”


"Drop the Yu-gi-oh cards now!"

2009 Lost Memories (2002) is the result of that kind of thinking. The opening credits bring us up to date on an alternate timeline where the foiled assassination of certain Japanese general in 1909 leads to Japan permanently occupying the Korean peninsula and Manchuria as well as entering WWII on the side of the U.S. By 2009 the concept of a separate Korean nationality has been all but eliminated.

Terrorists strike at a black tie reception for a display of archeological finds from China being held in Seoul. (Seoul in 2009 is represented by shots of modern Tokyo) The terrorists, the Hurei senjen, are heavily armed and isolate a large number of hostages, but make no demands. The police, led by Inspector Sakamoto (Dong-Kun Jan), storm the building and a huge gunfight breaks out. All the terrorists are killed, including one in civilian clothes who was trying to sneak out with the hostages.

In the wake of the carnage Sakamoto theorizes that the entire point of the raid may have had something to do with the one terrorist who was trying to escape. Sakamoto further finds a certain artifact near that terrorist's body that was unlikely to have gotten there unless the terrorist was carrying it. Noting that the artifact is similar to a pendant that he has seen on a mysterious woman in a recurring dream he has, Sakamoto launches his own investigation into Hurei senjen. Sure enough, the group is led by the woman of his dreams.


"We believe it proves that the ancient Chinese had seen the movie Crocodile Dundee."

Because he is too close to the truth the powerful Inoue Foundation, founded by the man who stopped that assassination in 1909 and owners of the artifact, tries to have Sakamoto, a crypto-Korean, killed. This drives Sakamoto to join the Hurei senjen and help them achieve their dream of freeing Korea form Japanese tyranny-- by using the magic artifact form the Inoue Foundation to send someone back in time to 1909. Okay, so this film isn't the speculative political thriller it may have looked like early on.

Leaving aside all the inherent paradoxes with time travel, 2009 Lost Memories asks us to ignore some huge gaping holes in the narrative. The most obvious one is that if the Inoue Foundation has magic artifacts that have made the Japanese the most powerful country in the Eastern Hemisphere, why would they put them on public display? In the countries that have the most to gain by stealing them? And why would you move them from place to place with almost no security, as seen in the movie? C'mon!


"Walk in to the light? Why doesn't the light eat hot lead instead!"

The other annoying thing about this movie is the reliance on huge gunfights between men with machine guns. Every half hour there's another huge gunfight whether it's needed or not. It's obvious from movies like this one and Shiri (1999) that big gunfights are a popular feature of Korean cinema, but none of the ones in 2009 Lost Memories are particularly interesting, nor do they push the plot forward. By the fourth one I was just counting the minutes until it was over and something important could happen. This is an action movie that could benefit from less action.

One last note: While I was looking at other reviews of this movie on the web quite a few writers mentioned that this movie is "unfair' to the Japanese. Is it really that obscure a historical fact that Japan occupied Korea for 35 years? With that in mind the movie makes a lot of sense, as it isn't creating a new occupation, just extending the one that really happened. The Japanese are the bad guys in the film, but in some ways 2009 Lost Memories represents a step forward in Korean-Japanese relations. Until 1998 all Japanese pop culture was banned from Korea (most Japanese animated films still are, though live action films are okay, oddly enough), and 2009 Lost Memories was one of the first Korean movies to feature Japanese actors at all, and the Japanese characters are not the broad, offensive stereotypes you might see in earlier Korean films.

Posted: Sun - January 16, 2005 at      

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