The Korean movie “Good News”… when power creates the truth and hides its heroes | art

Cinema does not need major wars to reveal the fragility of states; A single incident in heaven may reveal what is hidden on earth. From this idea, the film “Good News” begins, which reconstructs a tense moment in the history of East Asia during the Cold War, based on the hijacking of a civilian plane in 1970. But the film does not limit itself to narrating the incident, but rather goes beyond it to ask deeper questions: Who has the right to write the official narrative? Is the truth in politics made or discovered?

The film takes place in South Korea in 1970, amid rising regional tensions during the Cold War, and is inspired by the hijacking of a Japanese airliner carried out by a faction of the Japanese Red Army in the same year.

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The director re-presents this story in a thriller film that carries the spirit of black comedy, where political absurdity intersects with dangerous situations: a hijacked plane, a secret operation taking place in secret, and the blurring of boundaries between heroism, propaganda, and bureaucracy.

Anonymous runs the world

“Good News” revolves around three main characters who are involved in a complex operation to rescue a hijacked plane.

The first is a mysterious person called “Anonymous” (played by Sol Kyung-gu), who works as a secret intermediary for the Korean intelligence service; The second is Lieutenant Seo Gu Myung (portrayed by Hong Kyung), an Air Force officer who finds himself forced to participate in the mission despite his reservations. The third is Park Sang-hyun (played by Ryu Sung-bum), an intelligence official supervising the operation.

The three form an unexpected alliance to implement a bold plan, aiming to fool the hijackers that the plane is heading to Pyongyang, North Korea, when in fact it is landing in Seoul.

The film presents a critical vision of the mechanism of creating truth in a world where power controls the narrative more than what the facts describe. The crisis, as the work depicts it, is not defined by what happens inside the plane, but rather by what official institutions choose to tell the public.

Thus, the truth becomes the result of linguistic and media engineering, not a process of detection or investigation. Whoever owns the platform is the one who shapes memory and decides what is told and what is forgotten.

The character of Anonymous deeply embodies this contradiction; He is the one who goes into danger and saves lives, but he remains hidden from public recognition, as if true heroism has no place in the state’s narrative.

Through this intentional concealment, the film presents a sharp criticism of the institutions of power that deal with crises as displays to prove competence or maintain prestige, rather than as humanitarian situations that threaten real human life.

The actor is always unknown

The black comedy in “Good News” is not limited to the apparent paradoxes in the actors’ performances or the absurdity of officials’ decisions, but rather extends to the root of the authoritarian structure itself, where tournaments are managed and names are erased according to the mood of power.

This is evident in the character of Lieutenant Seo Gu Myung, an aviation controller who announces or denies his role depending on the reactions of his superiors; If he fails, he bears the blame, and if he succeeds, his name is erased so that the credit can be given to others. The same applies to “Anonymous,” who runs the entire operation in secret, a man who started out as a fighter from North Korea and ended up as an anonymous agent in the South, who does not even have papers proving his existence.

Director Byun Seung-hyun delivers a clever blend of thriller, espionage and political satire, revealing how heroism is forged in the office rather than on the field. In the operations room, the intelligence team decides to change the identity of the savior to fit the state’s discourse, and the security report is rearranged by deleting roles and replacing names, to create a new hero story that serves the media.

When a video clip of the security event is shown after it was edited by the intelligence services, the viewer realizes how the evidence is transformed into polished propaganda through cutting and pasting that determines who is rewarded and who is condemned.

In a painful scene, “Anonymous” appears after the end of the mission, watching news broadcasts that completely ignore him. The director films him with dim lighting, a cramped frame, and distorted sound, while a false patriotic image is displayed on the television screen that completely erases his presence. This is how the film summarizes its harsh idea: In a world created by power, true heroes are not remembered, because the perpetrator is always unknown.

Truth is what power sees

The fake “Pyongyang” scenes, whose scenes were specially designed to deceive the hijackers on the plane and the capital, “Seoul,” in the 1970s were an accurate reference to a recent past, and the visual and sound effects added realism and liveliness to them, reflecting that time in a comedic, sometimes ridiculous way, but it is an absurdity coming from a reality filled with it, and not contrived by the creators of the work.

Sol Kyung-go’s performance in the role of “Anonymous” is highlighted by his calm personality, his long coat, and his constant smoking. He has personal charisma and has an almost magical ability to resolve crises without media fanfare. Perhaps the most powerful thing about that performance is that broken and deeply sad look at the end of the film when he succeeds in extracting a personal identity, to embody a lifelong journey of denial.

The film plays with non-linear elements, flashback scenes, and sequences of misdirection. The film adds a sense of humor not only in the dialogue, but also through montage and the viewer’s evasion by suddenly revealing events and facts that were not within his expectations regarding those who believe that the kidnapping is real and begin to argue about which path will be taken, while those in control manipulate perceptions more than events.

The film is characterized by its audio mix of excitement and satire, which is a constantly captivating mixture; The film maintains its momentum and the spirit of surprise in its first two chapters, and is distinguished by its thematic ambition around truth, narrative, and power, and the strong main performance of actor Sol Kyung-gu plays the largest role in the film’s success. But the film’s style oscillates, at times, from the edge of violence to absurd comedy, and for some viewers these twists constitute an interruption rather than enriching the work.

By evoking the real historical incident, the film confirms that collective memory is not an objective record, but rather the result of political choices, which is what is revealed and what is concealed, who is celebrated and who is erased from the narrative. Even the title of the film itself alludes to the paradox that “good news” is not necessarily what happens, but what is marketed.