North Korean Action Movie

Real Time News shows us some clips from an action movie that recently aired on North Korean TV:

The film is an anti-Japanese propaganda epic set in 1910, with Korean heroes using taekwondo to battle the evil Japanese occupiers of their country. The climax of the movie is a martial arts duel between the main hero and a Japanese villain. The Japanese guy is no match for the Korean’s mighty taekwondo, and he resorts to fighting dirty, going so far as to use a samurai sword on the unarmed Korean martial artist. None of this can stop the hero, and he triumphs in the duel (only to be shot at the end of the movie by Japanese soldiers). Based on such films, it would seem that Kim Jong-Il really wants his people to dislike the Japanese.

After the summarizing the movie, the news segment interviews a group of Japanese stuntmen, who tell us from their professional standpoint that the fight scenes in the movie were not particularly difficult. After easily replicating several of the North Korean fight scenes, they also point out that small wires are visible in some of the scenes where the martial artists fly through the air. While it might not use the latest advanced techniques or special effects, it’s still a somewhat impressive achievement for the North Korean movie industry.