Silmido. This movie beat Taegukgi at some Blue Dragon Awards in South Korea for the Best Picture award. And because Taegukgi currently holds a top spot in my list of favorite movies, I was expecting a lot from this Korean blockbuster. Like Taegukgi, Silmido brushes on South Korea’s perennial issue with North Korea. This was Korea’s highest grossing movie of all time, which claim was shortlived because Taegukgi took it a few months later.

Silmido is actually a familiar story to Filipinos. Think JABIDAH. Let’s have a Philippine history lesson here, just to drive Silmido’s story closer to home. Back in the late 1960’s, roughly the same time Silmido happened, President Ferdinand Marcos was planning to take advatage of Malaysia’s fragile state to reclaim Sabah as Philippine territory. Under Oplan Merdeka, trained undercover Muslim Filipinos would infiltrate Sabah and destabilize the internal situation through violence, propaganda, etcetera. To form the group of infiltrators, to be called the Jabidah unit, the government secretly recuited nearly 200 Muslim Filipinos from Sulu and Tawi-Tawi for training. After a few months, these trainees were brought to Corregidor island near Manila to intensify their preparations. All these, of course, were happening in secret. The trainees apparently didn’t know that they were training for an actual “Sabah invasion”. When they found out, they started becoming disillusioned, and because they also were not being given the benefits they were promised, they grew heavily dissatisfied. With such disgruntled trainees, Ferdinand Marcos feared that the entire mission would fail and leak into the media and would cause disastrous consequences for the Philippines’ conflict with its own Muslim insurgents and its foreign relations with Malaysia especially. His solution: kill them all before that happens!! Unfortunately for Marcos, one trainee survived and approached Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., Marcos’ chief rival.

Okay, back to Silmido. The gist of the story is basically the same. The South Korean government secretly trains a group of otherwise-death convicts in the island of Silmi. This specially-trained group, called Special Unit 684, would be tasked to infiltrate North Korea and assassinate its leaders. The trainees undergo unimaginably torturous training before they were sent onto their mission, which at the last moment was cancelled due to thawing relations with North Korea. By then, the special Silmido unit was not needed but releasing the trainees back to society could pose the disastrous threat of leakage. Thefore, a plan to kill them all was formed.

I’m not a fan of action-packed, high-octane blockbusters. Silmido is one such movie. But then, it also attempted to deliver a more serious political undertone. And it ends off being tragic without coming off as overly dramatic. So, was it better than Taegukgi? For me with all my biases, no. My rating: 8.5/10

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004 at 10:46 am and is filed under Movie Babble . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.