(movie review: R-POINT)

Point not taken
By David Hontiveros

R-Point is Asian horror by way of Korea. Directed by Kong Soo-Chang from a screenplay he co-wrote with Phil Young-Woo, R-Point is set in 1972 during the Vietnam war and tells the story of 1st Lieutenant Choi Tae-In (Kam Woo-Seong), who must lead a group of eight men to uncover the fates of the missing soldiers from Battalion 53, their last known position six months ago, somewhere in the middle of R-Point, designated a “non-combat zone” in military jargon, but considered sacred ground by the Vietnamese.

Despite the welcome change of setting for an Asian horror film, sadly, R-Point doesn’t really show us anything new and also lacks any sort of real tension in its story and pacing. And though it tries to give us tiny character notes on each member of the squad to make them more than just mere cannon fodder, this is a tactic used in all war films, a convention of the genre, really, and thus, nothing new, either.

Liberated as we are from the usual urban or rural setting of the standard Asian horror film, it’s sad that the Vietnam setting isn’t exploited well at all. Adrian Lyne’s brilliant Jacob’s Ladder manages to do more in a single Vietnam sequence than R-Point does in an entire feature-length film. It’s unfortunate that Kong and his fellow scriptwriter didn’t pick up on the rich potential of distilling the true horror of the Vietnam conflict and transposing it onto the ghost story template. There isn’t even a hint of the idea of War as Death, as the ultimate faceless spectre which consumes lives indiscriminately, cutting them off short, possibly leaving hordes of restless souls in its wake.

The arenas of horror and dark fantasy have always been rich and interesting places from which to tell stories that reflect back upon the real world. An indie horror film like The Ghosts of Edendale, an allegory on the price of success and the difficulties of making it in Hollywood, is a good example of using the template to tell multi-layered stories. And though The Ghosts of Edendale was far from perfect and wasn’t really all that scary, it did have something it wanted to say. R-Point is a straight-forward ghost story with no discernible layers to it, which is, in and of itself, not necessarily a bad thing; but then, if it’s a ghost story that isn’t particularly scary in the first place, then what is it, in the final analysis?

There are, to make matters worse, plot holes that weaken the film even further. Was the Lieutenant that preoccupied that he didn’t even make a headcount? Is a battalion that big that a member of it wouldn’t even recognize a fellow comrade? (Of course, I’ve never been in a war myself, so maybe these are natural enough mistakes, but somehow, they just seem like conveniences to set up the film’s latest “scare.”) And the leaps of logic Lt. Choi makes in the final set piece—which seems terribly derivative of a similar scene in John Carpenter’s astounding remake of The Thing—are stupefying, to say the least.

By the film’s climax, the truth of R-Point is as much of a mystery as it was at the beginning, which may have been the idea, but such as it is, it’s a dissatisfied feeling I have coming away from the movie. At a time when the Asian horror film bubble is showing signs of strain, I had high hopes for R-Point, but it just doesn’t deliver.

Not particularly noteworthy as a war film or a horror film, R-Point doesn’t have all that much going for it, save for a couple of creepy moments. It feels rather like one of those ghost stories told to you by a friend or acquaintance: no real flair in the tale-telling, and the scares seem generic and tired.

With Asian horror films practically a dime a dozen these days, and where even the not-particularly-good ones are being gobbled up by the Hollywood remake machine, it’s only the exceptional ones that truly deserve our attention. The quiet, subtle horror of Fruit Chan’s Dumplings was way ahead of last year’s pack, including Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call. And ultimately, as far ahead as Dumplings is from One Missed Call, so is One Missed Call from R-Point. Though some might think One Missed Call is derivative of films like Ringu and Ju-On, it at least was saying something and was scary as well; R-Point is just limp and wan, an anemic entry in the Asian horror film scene, at a time when we need films with hot, boiling blood in their celluloid veins to keep the movement vital and alive.