Ashfall

So, right after watching three documentaries on Pompeii, I watched a South Korean movie called Ashfall (in English) whose Korean title is BaekDu San (BakeDur mountain. The premise is that Baekdu erupts and a team must find a way to steal nuclear warheads from a North Korean facility, with the help of a North Korean double-agent, and then bring a detonator to a mine near the mountain to set off an explosion that will defuse the next big eruption. The movie has one action set-piece after another, starting with the eruption causing an earthquake in Seoul that knocks down a bunch of buildings while our hero, a bomb-deactivator specialist, drives through the falling rubble to try to return to his pregnant wife's side. The movie doesn't really care how we get from one set-piece to the next. Characters just arrive at their next destination in a very efficient way. There is a lot of buddy-antagonist by-play between our South Korean hero and the North Korean spy. They release him from prison so he can guide them to the nukes, but they struggle with him all the way to the end of the story. He is shot by the Chinese gangsters he was trying to use to escape with his daughter, just before they are in a firefight with Americans who are also getting in the way of the mission. The Americans have barged in and taken over the Korean president's HQ, and fire on our hero team, who fight back and fight them off. Never mind plausibility: one does not simply drive into Mordor,.But our heroes not only manage to get the detonator into the mine with five minutes to spare, one of them sacrifices himself while the other drives away and is not swallowed up by pyroclastic surges or crushed by flaming debris.  The pregnant wife is trapped on a bridge in her car when a tidal wave strikes it, but manages to get out of the car, swim her way out of the river without taking off her coat, and hop onto the bus she needed to catch to head to an American evacuation site in Incheon.  She also gives birth right at the moment the mountain is bombed into submission. All in all it was a fairly enjoyable if mindless disaster movie, with a Korean spin on familiar tropes.

I recognized each and every actor in the film from all my Korean drama viewing. Well-known actors were even in minor roles. The movie was a big box office success right before the pandemic hit.