When I saw there would be a screening of a South Korean action movie playing at the Riviera, I knew I had to go.

One of my favorite movies I’ve seen in the last few years is Train to Busan, a South Korean genre film that premiered at Cannes to rapturous reviews. Hope, directed by Na Hong-Jin, seemed to be something similar. However, instead of a zombie outbreak on a train, this time it’s an alien invasion that spirals out of control in a tiny harbor town.

When a large ox is discovered butchered on a highway, a police chief races back to town to alert the locals and get backup for whatever is attacking the local livestock. As he gets closer to town, he gets more disturbing calls over the radio: people are calling in to report sightings of a monster rampaging through the town and causing massive destruction in its wake. Explosions spiral into the air. By the time the police chief arrives, the town is deadly quiet. It’s almost as if no one lives there.

The seemingly abandoned town makes the following suspense almost unbearable, almost as if you’re watching a horror movie. In some ways, you are. We follow the police chief as he witnesses broken bodies lying in the street, entire storefronts destroyed nearby. The follow survivors he encounters are all terrified, yet armed to the teeth and determined to keep fighting for how much time they have left. Every time he tries to catch his breath, something else happens that requires him to keep moving or die. It isn’t until he peeks into a dark and abandoned building that he spots the monster.

That’s when the illusion breaks.

In a stunning comic-book-esque moment, glorious slo-mo is used to illustrate the alien monster bursting out of a market building and swooping in for the kill, using the body of a man they killed to hit another potential victim like a club. It’s jaw-dropping in the best way. Despite the inconsistent VFX work, these aliens have an incredible onscreen presence, making every chase scene a nail-biter.

Played by Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, and Taylor Russell, these are antagonists you can’t help but root for. There’s a certain B-movie charm in how these characters are portrayed. They’re certainly not Thanos, but their deadly presence is enough to strike fear deep into your heart. When they’re standing still, it’s easy to think they’re no threat. When they’re on the move, it’s a whole other story. They’re astonishingly fast. It’s almost a miracle how far the characters make it.

This film has been described as a cult classic in the making, and I certainly don’t disagree. The thing about cult classics is they don’t necessarily need to be good in the traditional sense. It doesn’t need mainstream approval, it just needs something to get the audience it wants hooked. And this film provides pure spectacle distilled. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire film. Blending together horror, dark-comedy, Spielbergian aliens, and more, Hope is a hodge-podge of a blockbuster fantasy that doesn’t seem to know what to do with all it has. But there’s a certain charm in here. Even a cinematic mess can be entertaining with the right amount of passion. There’s no worse crime in an action movie than to bore its audience.

There’s certainly a lack of compelling world-building in this film, which comes to the film’s detriment, especially as its intentions as a franchise are clearly being built up. It also doesn’t bode well for the characters, who have a certain amount of plot armor to the point some can sustain an amount of damage that would reduce any other character to blood spatter. Because they’re important to the plot, they still live. Some characters are also just there to serve a practical purpose, like to shoot a gun or cause foils in the story. It’s funny that some of the most hateable characters in this film are the most entertaining for the sheer level of fucked up situations they leave in their wake. Still, it’s impossible to wipe off the smile on your face.

I wouldn’t have asked for anything more.

FURTHER THOUGHTS

• Sung-ae and Sung-ki deserve their own spin-offs.
• I want to know what it takes to build an entire village, and then reduce it to rubble for an action movie. That’s gotta be so fun to do.
• I would willingly watch a road movie with all four of the main characters.