The Battleship Island
Short description
During the Japanese colonial period, hundreds of Koreans are forced to work in the coal mines of Hashima, an island off the coast of Nagasaki that resembles a warship and is known to Koreans as Gunham. Among those taken there is Lee Kang-ok, a bandmaster who accepted an offer of work in Japan and arrives with his young daughter, along with a troublemaker named Choi Chil-sung and Park Moo-young, a member of the Korean resistance. Together with the other prisoners, they plan a mass escape from the island.
Ryoo Seung-wan directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Shin Kyung-il. It came after Veteran in his filmography and before Escape from Mogadishu. Hwang Jung-min leads the cast as Lee Kang-ok, with So Ji-sub, Song Joong-ki, Lee Jung-hyun, Kim Su-an and Kim Min-jae in supporting roles. The production involved 323 credited cast members and 47 credited crew members.
Made for about 25 million USD, the film earned roughly 46 million USD worldwide after its July 2017 release. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.1 from around 9,400 votes, and on TMDB it has a rating of 7.2 from 299 votes. A critics' rating of 6.3 from 15 reviews sits below both audience scores, indicating that viewers responded to the film more warmly than reviewers did.
What's left behind the scenes
- The characters and events depicted in the film are fictional, although between 1943 and 1945, Chinese and Korean people were indeed brought to the island of Hashima for forced labor in underwater coal mines.
- The film's characters mention the company they work for several times, but its name is never spoken. In reality, it refers to Mitsubishi Corporation, which owned Hashima Island until 2002.
- The director's cut of the film has a runtime of 151 minutes.
- In one interview, director Ryu Seung-wan joked that he made this film specifically to dramatically cut up the flag of the Imperial Japanese Army (1870–1945) on camera.
- The film was criticized by right-wing Japanese media. In particular, the Sankei Shimbun newspaper accused the creators of distorting historical truth.
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