Making its North American premiere and acting as the centerpiece film at this year’s NYAFF is the Kim Ji-Woon (I Saw the Devil) and Yim Pil-Sung co-directed feature, Doomsday Book, a highly anticipated feature that’s been in the making since 2006 but was delayed due to issues with the third story, originally directed by Han Jae-Rim. After years on the shelf, the film found some money and the two directors collaborated to create a new final chapter, finally giving us an opportunity to take a look at the results.
The film is broken up into three parts. The first is Yim Pil-Sung’s “A Brave New World,” the second is Kim Ji-Woon’s “The Heavenly Creature,” and the third is a co-directed segment titled “Happy Birthday.”
Yim’s “A Brave New World” chapter is a zombie apocalypse short that originally focuses on a nice young man trying to deal with his frustrating family and find a lady to mate with. Eventually, due to intense pollution, a piece of meat gets infected and our lead, along with a large number of other people throughout the city, turn into zombies. Eventually, the short culminates to a perplexing finale that involves our original lead and his love interest sharing zombie love. Even if it is a bit odd and doesn’t make any real points, this segment is hilarious in its style and approach and is probably the best segment of the three, which sucks since the rest of the movie can’t compare.
Extremely shifting tonal gears, act two, “The Heavenly Creature,” is very similar to the film iRobot except that it’s a drama with a religious backdrop. Set in the future, robots have become the chief source of labor but there is a robot residing at a Buddhist temple that has achieved enlightenment and can now think for itself. Sounds familiar, right? When the company who makes the robot finds out from the engineer who went in to check it, they arrive on scene ready to exchange and destroy the robot since they deem it defective and a threat.
I had anticipated this short to be completely different when I saw the robot in the trailer. It’s a very well made and beautifully shot segment, but the actual story doesn’t really fit into the overarching theme of the film. Ji-Woon’s short focuses on the idea of perception, the question of “what am I?”, and, in a way, the basic idea of creationism. This prophet-like robot wasn’t looking to destroy the world, though the manufacturer would make you think that with how aggressive they were acting towards it. Heavenly Creature has its clever moments, but when a majority of the short consists of people yelling at each other it does ware on you, especially when you get a good sense as to where it’s all going.
The final short, Happy Birthday, is, an odd final act but one that’s in line with the doomsday idea despite how quirky it may be. When a girl orders an 8-ball online for her father, she ends up ordering it from an odd site that she randomly found on the net. 10 years later, her ball hasn’t arrived but something else is on its way, a big old meteor. From there, the short follows the girl, her parents and her uncle as they brace for the meteor’s impact in their fallout shelter. While all the focus is on the family, the funniest part of this segment has to do 
with the news station they’re watching and the people reporting it since the anchor screwed two of the woman on the show. Anyway, “Happy Birthday” is a fun and unexpectedly quirky sci-fi segment that’s a little too long and a little weird too, though the end, which actually looks stunning, is a massive “wtf?” moment.
To be honest, my only exposure to the film before I sat down to write this review was watching the trailer and looking at the poster. I knew it was being co-directed and there would be three segments, but other than that I went in blind. Suffice to say whatever I thought I was going into, based on the trailer, the result was completely different. Not only is the trailer amazingly deceptive, but the title Doomsday Book isn’t fitting at all, there is no damn book (though if you count the film’s segments as chapters maybe you can make an argument) and one of the chapters barely qualifies as Doomsday material.
For fans of Korean cinema, Doomsday Book is an exciting feature because of the strong talent involved. There are good directors and good actors but it’s a shame that it doesn’t add up to much of anything and isn’t worth all the hype. For what the filmmakers were trying to achieve, or for what I think they were trying to achieve, they mostly failed. Excluding the first act, there was never a true sense of impending doom like the title suggests, maybe it was the comedy that removed the doom factor from the final chapter but I just didn’t feel like all the pieces fit together well.
Rating: A very funny, very dramatic collaborative picture that lacks substance and doesn’t fully come together (5/10)
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