![]() The problem is that reproducing those things alone, or even in concert, doesn't reproduce what made the original special. To wit: the soldier's grotesque super-armor, or the staircase-set design of the sewer lair, or a moment when the glowing red eye sockets of the Unit's masks seem to leave trails, or even the design of the film's title card. The plot tracks fairly closely with it, and there's no end of familiar images from it hoisted and converted into live-action more or less as is. Wolf without fangsįans of Jin-Roh will have little trouble mapping back everything they see here to the original. © Warner Brothers Korea / Lewis Pictures Lim and Yun-hee, at the mercy of Public Security man Han. But Lim is not having any of it, and those in the Unit are not either - and they are not above using Lim and Yun-hee to set a trap for those that have betrayed them in turn. Her mission has been to get involved with Lim and stage an incident, the better to discredit both him and the Unit. Yun-hee is a former Sect member, blackmailed by Han, and shuttlecocked back and forth between rivals within the government - the Public Security forces that want to foment further chaos and seize power, and those that want to keep what peace can be kept. The way she spells it out, there is no one truly culpable figure in the story - the hungry wolf, the helpless granny, the innocent child - and likewise the evils of the world are not so readily pinned on any one person, much as we want them to. As with the animated film, there's the parable of Little Red Riding Hood - the bloodthirsty original, not the sanitized happy-ending version - to explain her feelings. She doesn't even blame Lim for his actions after all, it's not like he pulled the trigger on her. She is grateful to have a piece of her sister's life back, but also curiously fatalistic about the whole thing. With Unit operations officially suspended, Lim sets out on the downlow to track down the girl's sister, Yun-hee (Hyo-jo Han). A former Brigade comrade of his, Han (Mu-yeol Kim), also from the massacre, but now in charge of the investigation against them, does him a solid on the sly and provides him with a lead to the remaining members of the Sect - the diary of the girl who blew herself up, Jae-hee. He was one of the officers in that classroom massacre. One of the Unit soldiers, Lim (Dong-won Gang), had that girl at gunpoint right as she pulled the pin, but he couldn't bring himself to fire on her. Pressure mounts to have the Brigade disbanded, or at the very least its operations suspended. When the Special Unit corners Sect members in its underground lair, one of their underage bomb carriers ("Red Riding Hoods") sets off a bomb and kills herself - a girl about the same age as one of a classroom of kids the Brigade mistakenly killed years back. The movie opens in 2029, with an anti-reunification protest that turns into a bloody ambush by the Sect. A new elite police squad called the Special Unit, its members armored and helmeted like Darth Vader crossed with RoboCop, is formed to deal with them. Anti-government terrorism by an outfit named "the Sect" becomes a fact of life. Japan and the rest of the West push back in turn, isolating the new Korea. Illang takes the opposite tack: it's set in the near-future, where the two halves of the Korean peninsula elect to reunify as a bulwark against growing pressure from China. The original film was set in an alternate past, a 1950s where Japan had fallen into a mix of anarchy and fascist autarchy. © Warner Brothers Korea / Lewis Pictures Terrorists in a chaotic South Korea face off against the deadly Special Unit. The live-action version is half gritty action film and half noirish spy thriller - competent enough on its own, but missing the primal sorcery conjured up by the original. The original Jin-Roh had an icy, tragic sense of remove, further given a phantasmal, shadow-play quality by its animation. But I still felt like director Jee-woon Kim had missed the point. Illang is assembled with great technical competence and more than a little insight into what made the original story tick. It's that you lose as much as you gain, and what they've lost here is not something you can just throw back in. The problem with Illang: The Wolf Brigade, a live-action remake of Mamoru Oshii & Hiroyuki Okura's Jin-Roh, is not that you can't or shouldn't remake anime as live action.
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