The Battle of Jangsari Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		2.5

The Battle of Jangsari Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 23, 2020

North Korea has (for better or worse) been in the news quite a bit lately, and there are at least some folks strenuously arguing for more “normalized” relations with the country. So, how do the South Koreans feel about that? One probably need look no further than the South Korean film The Battle of Jangsari to figure out that “normalization” might best be accomplished by starting “closer to home”, so to speak, since the film makes no bones about demonizing North Korea’s incursion into the south, actions that of course precipitated the Korean War. The Battle of Jangsari is evidently ripped from the (pretty old) headlines in documenting the rather incredible exploits of a battalion of kids (pretty much literally — their average age was 17) who were part of a diversionary force sent to confuse the North Koreans as General Douglas MacArthur’s Battle for Incheon: Operation Chromite was getting underway (some online sources suggest that Battle for Incheon: Operation Chromite and this film currently under discussion are “officially” linked, and the two do share some production personnel). As such, The Battle of Jangsari shares at least some underlying foundational elements with Saving Private Ryan, both in terms of allied forces attempting to fool their opponents about where the “main” invasion is going to take place, but also perhaps more saliently with regard to some visceral footage documenting what it’s like to step off of a boat into swirling ocean waters and attempt to make it inland under a barrage of enemy fire. The similarity to Steven Spielberg's classic war film is probably only emphasized by a coda of sorts where one character is seen as an aged man in "current" time, a la the scene of an "elderly" Matt Damon toward the end of Saving Private Ryan.

It’s kind of interesting in a way to watch the three trailers included on this Blu-ray disc as supplements to see that the film was obviously marketed differently for audiences in Korea and the United States, as exemplified by the fact that in the U.S. Trailer Megan Fox, who really is consigned to what amounts to a cameo, is given top billing, and George Eads, who isn’t even mentioned in the Korean trailers, also gets a large font mention. That said, this is a film which will probably resonate most strongly with Korean audiences, since it’s so intimately tied to their own history and is obviously designed to bring some admittedly long past due recognition to the more than 700 kids who helped in their own way to push back the North Korean “menace”.

The film actually starts with a scene that might have been right at home in The Poseidon Adventure, with a ship attempting to make its way through a ferocious storm. The ship holds the kids, and there are some brief introductions (interrupted interstitially by supposedly comic moments of various characters vomiting due to the “turbulence”) of several characters who will play into the story as the actual battle commences. The film also ping pongs fitfully to the Megan Fox character, here named Maggie and, according to some ending credits based on both Margaret Bourke-White and Marguerite Higgins. Fox, not exactly the model of an actress with (shall we say) gravitas, doesn’t exactly resonate with authority in the one extended scene she’s given, where she berates a South Korean General for not having his troops’ “back”.

The Battle of Jangsari probably does a better job in terms of the actual battles being depicted, though, again, many of these sequences seem to have been culled from some discarded storyboards left over from Saving Private Ryan. Framings are often alarmingly similar to those Spielberg used, and even the overall ambience is rather the same, including the blistering sound design. Unfortunately, The Battle of Jangari probably won’t engage the sentiments of Americans in the same way that Saving Private Ryan did, probably understandably, but my hunch is even some Koreans won’t be overly moved by the carnage on display since the film really doesn’t do an adequate job of making the audience care about the various characters.

All of this said, The Battle of Jangsari was obviously made with good intentions, and it does at least shed a little light on a little known and/or remembered sidebar to the Incheon invasion. As such, some armchair historians, especially those with a particular interest in Korean history for either personal or other reasons, may find this intermittently interesting, if nothing else than as a building block for further research.

The Battle of Jangsari Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Battle of Jangsari is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA (the actual film is a co-presentation of Warner Brothers' Korean branch) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. This is yet another film that doesn't seem to offer much technical data online, though the very brief Making Of featurette included on the disc as a supplement includes an even briefer snippet showing some kind of digital camera being used, and I'm as usual assuming things were finished at a 2K DI. Aside from what is now the expected flurry of banding during Well Go USA's opening masthead, there aren't any major compression anomalies of note, and the film, while kind of weirdly graded toward kind of sickly looking yellows and greens a lot of the time, offers excellent detail levels for the bulk of the presentation. The brightly lit daytime scenes offer nice fine detail on everything from the gritty sands of the beaches where the kids land to some of the more gruesome injuries they suffer. Some of the nighttime material has a somewhat murky appearance, probably exacerbated by a tendency to grade things toward darker blues.

The Battle of Jangsari Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Battle of Jangsari features a rather robust DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track largely in the original Korean, though with the Megan Fox sequences in English (with optional English subtitles for the Korean language moments only). This is a consistently immersive track, one with some pretty powerful bursts of LFE (the low end "thunk" that accompanies the opening shipboard sequence actually kind of hurt my ears after a while). The battle scenes offer a glut of whizzing and panning bullet effects, with other ambient environmental sounds regularly dotting the surround channels. Dialogue in both languages is presented cleanly and clearly, and I noticed no issues whatsoever with regard to dropouts, distortion or other damage.

The Battle of Jangsari Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Of (1080i; 3:20)


• Trailer A (1080p; 1:21)


• Trailer B (1080p; 1:54)


• US Trailer (1080p; 1:37)

Note: As often tends to be the case with Well Go USA Blu-ray releases, the supplements have been authored to follow one another automatically (so that clicking on the Making Of featurette is essentially a Play All button. After the US Trailer for this film plays, the disc has been authored to automatically move on to trailers for other Well Go USA releases. Those trailers for other Well Go USA releases also play automatically at disc boot up.

The Battle of Jangsari Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I really wanted to like The Battle of Jangsari more than I ended up doing, simply because its story of brave young (and disastrously underprepared) soldiers attempting to help free their country from a perceived threat would seem to be a really interesting story. Unfortunately, the film is too haphazard in its presentation, and the actual history is going to be a bit muddled for many American viewers at least, with the few English language expository scenes coming off as almost willfully clunky at times. Technical merits are solid for those considering a purchase.