Pandora (film)

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Movie
German title Pandora
Original title Pandora ( 판도라 )
Country of production South Korea
original language Korean
Publishing year 2016
length 136 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Park Jung-woo
script Park Jung-woo
production Kim Chul-yong,
Park Kyung-sook
music Jo Yeong-wook
camera Choi Young-hwan
cut Park Gok-ji
occupation

Pandora is a South Korean disaster film from 2016 , which is about a serious accident in a nuclear power plant and the consequences. Directed by Park Jung-woo .

action

The film is about a small family around Jae-hyeok, who live near a nuclear power plant in southeast South Korea. Jea-hyeok is unhappy with his life and work as a technician at the power plant. He hates the power plant because his father and brother were once contaminated and died there. Because of this, and because there is no other job in the small town, he plans to hire a ship to make a fresh start. His mother, who thinks he's a failure, is very upset about it. His girlfriend Jeong-hye, who works as a guide for visitor groups at the power plant, is also very angry with him because she has no family and he is all he has.

The next morning, shortly after the change of shift, an earthquake occurs in the region, with some lines in the power plant that are responsible for cooling the reactor being blocked and some important electronic systems collapse. First radioactivity emerges. While the repair work begins in the power station, people in the immediate vicinity are only evacuated after a certain period of time, including Jae-hyeok's family, who are housed in a stadium in a nearby city. The situation in the power plant is getting more and more out of control as the pressure inside the reactor continues to rise. Panic breaks out among the workers. However, Jae-hyeok and his colleagues are jailed and imprisoned as they are pressured to continue with the repairs. The authorities have now also recognized the seriousness of the situation and are taking precautions. But it is too late and the building explodes from the pressure. Jae-hyeok and his colleagues are buried in rubble, but survive badly injured and escape. After a phone call with Jeong-hye he can warn them, but they and everyone else are locked in the stadium and all communication channels are interrupted.

With the rise in radiation and the fact that many countries have started evacuating their compatriots, the matter is coming to the fore. Those trapped in the stadium can free themselves and hijack a bus with which they want to get to safety. Panic breaks out across the country and telecommunications and supply routes collapse. Jae-hyeok and the others are taken to a hospital where care can hardly be maintained. The reactor, which has not yet been cooled with seawater because of the interests of the operator, since it would otherwise be unusable, threatens to melt. Only when the crisis team around the president realizes that the whole country would be affected if the core melts, they give the order to cool with seawater, which actually helps and the radiation emitted decreases. However, it turns out that a cooling pool for spent core rods, which is located directly next to the reactor block, was damaged by the explosion and contaminated coolant escapes through a gap. A new catastrophe looms. Meanwhile, Jae-hyeok's family continued to flee on foot because the highway was blocked by abandoned vehicles.

As the situation across the country becomes more and more precarious, the President gives a televised address. Volunteers are needed to repair the crack in order to prevent further leakage of the coolant and thus a core meltdown . Knowing that they don't have much longer to live anyway, because they already have radiation sickness , Jae-hyeok and his friends volunteer. His family only finds out about this project through detours. The plan to mend the crack fails, however, as it continues to grow and the catastrophe has become inevitable. As an alternative, however, one could consider blowing up the ceiling so that the cooling rods in the space below fall into the coolant and a new tank is created. Jae-hyeok, who is best at handling explosives, volunteers to stay in the chamber and prepare for the demolition while his colleagues seal the room. As a last wish, however, he asks that he come on TV to say goodbye to his family. She runs back into the bus with which they escaped and can see Jae-hyeok one last time, where he asks her forgiveness in front of the whole country and says that he is not a loser. After throwing the helmet with the camera into the water and breaking the connection, Jae-hyeok activates the explosive charges, dropping the fuel rods into the new pool while he dies.

In the final scene you can see that the area around the power plant is an abandoned restricted area while a sarcophagus is being built around the destroyed reactor . Jae-hyeok explains from the off that they opened Pandora's box when they opened up nuclear power and so plunged the world into suffering. So the question should be asked whether the children are given a rich or a healthy world. At the end one sees Jeong-hye walking in a daze to the barrier to the exclusion zone and hanging up a photo of all of them as children.

background

The film is based on the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011, in which an earthquake also caused damage to the power plant and thus to the accident. At the end of the film, it is shown that South Korea has the country with the closest population to nuclear power plants. In addition, more nuclear power plants are under construction.

production

The film was funded in part by crowdfunding for a grant of 530 million won .

publication

Pandora was released in South Korea on December 7th, 2016 . Netflix had secured the worldwide streaming rights for the film. The film has been available to German Netflix customers since March 17, 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Disaster movie 'Pandora' rings true more than ever. koreatimes.co.kr, December 4, 2016, accessed March 21, 2017 .
  2. ^ Dal Yong Jin: Transnational Korean Cinema. Cultural Politics, Film Genres, and Digital Technologies . Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2020, ISBN 978-1-978807-88-4 , pp. 27 .
  3. ↑ Netflix Acquires Global Rights to Korean Nuclear Disaster Film 'Pandora'. variety.com, accessed March 21, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Netflix in March: New films and series - it's getting that exciting from March 17th. In: Huffington Post Germany . March 17, 2017. Retrieved March 21, 2017 .