I love how all of these posters are for promoting a movie about go, the board game. Though since it’s a Korean film is it more appropriate to say baduk from now on?
This opened in my local theater this weekend and I’d never heard of it or the first movie. A cursory googling also made it sound like it it was an independent story from the first movie (though I read tonight they have a loose but connection) but I decided to check it out since it seemed like a weird fusion of gangster drama, action film, and the board game go. What I realized as I watched it is it’s a very obvious abridged version of comic, packing in and rushing through several story arcs to cram the whole story in under two hours- the fate of many a comic book adaptations. Except when I googled the movie later it’s not actually based on a comic at all. It just does an incredible job at feeling exactly like a bad comic movie adaptation.
It’s a revenge story where half the battles are settled through games of go with particular stipulations. Early on the protagonist is forced as a child to train by playing games without seeing the board itself. Later on, these skills come in handy when he battles against a shaman who makes both players use pieces of the same color. “Don’t look up, or you’ll lose your way,” he recites to his opponents right before he begins to divine their past traumas to taunts them. And the loser has to chop off their hand.
There’s a match later on that takes place on a railroad as a train barrels closer and closer, there’s a go board that sprays acid in your face if enough of your pieces get captured. It has interesting concepts like that and it’s fun to see what they come up with next, but the problem is that outside one or two matches the movie does very little to communicate a story during any of these matches. It doesn’t establish any emotional stakes or much reason for these fights to be happening outside the broadest of contexts and the go matches themselves are never a focus, opting instead of quick 10-20 second montages of the players placing pieces. The matches begins and end in a dozen or two seconds. Also, between all these matches the main character gets caught up in hand-to-hand brawls too.
Communicating the plot through go matches can be a challenge when your movie has ten or more matches in under two hours, but it doesn’t even tell a story about the people in the matches. Why does this match matter? What is on the line? What are they fighting about? It so quickly breezes from match to match while also being so cleanly segmented into story arcs that it has the quality of a comic book movie that is merely trying to touch every pivotal moment from a source material.
But I thought there was still fun to be had. Seeing what weird game concepts they had next was fun. But it also had this real stylized intensity to it. It channels the spirit of comic book world-building and storytelling very well, combining the pulpy tones of gritty gangster dramas like Sanctuary and street brawling focused stories like Crows, and those stories that are about gambling and games (think Noboyuki Fukumoto stories like Akagi and Kaiji). The movie even has a brief “opening sequence” showcasing the cast of characters, who have names like The Shaman, The Loner, Mr. Turd, and Ms. Hong. I think the main character is simply known as ghost finger, or something like that. The lighting and colors make use of strong contrast and saturation with dark tones, and I think the camera work and lens choices evoked those large two page spreads that really stand out in comics. It’s peppered with really strong single images.
This is more directly going into spoiler territory so I’ll blur it in case someone is interested enough to check the movie out (content warning: sexual violence and self harm):
the most striking image of the movie is definitely during the battle with the shaman. In fact, that shaman match is probably the high point of the movie since it’s the only time it showcases any kind of challenge for the protagonist to overcome. The Main Character challenges the Shaman to a match because, I assumed, the Shaman was the one responsible for taking the hand of the main character’s teacher. The Shaman makes both players play using the same colored white-tinted translucent stones so the Main Character keeps his eyes focused on the board to track his pieces while the Shaman portends to what must have been the downfall of all who challenge him: “Don’t look up, or you’ll lose your way.”
But being The Shaman, a person who can divine the past and future of anyone he meets, he begins to speak of the suicide of the Main Character’s sister, the circumstances that led him down his path of Extreme Go Playing over a decade ago to one day get revenge on The Best Go Player In The World, who had abused his sister. And as the Shaman dredges up the memories and the sweat begins to bead on the Main Character’s face, you begin to see the body of his sister literally hanging over the board as they play. This isn’t a subtle movie at all but I thought it was a striking visual to represent where the Main Character’s head space was during that fight. And so of course the Main Character eventually gets angry enough that he makes the mistake of looking up from the board and facing the Shaman. The Shaman responds with a smile: “I told you. Don’t look up, or you’ll lose your way.”
Anyway, Divine Move 2 was a bad movie but it was still kind of cool. Just felt like I needed to write down some thoughts somewhere. I’ll probably check out the first movie sometime which sounds like it’s a completely different story that has the exact same concept.