Emergency Declaration (2021)
Review of Emergency Declaration / 비상선언 (2021), directed by Han Jae-rim
Ever since I first saw this movie premiering at the Cannes Film Festival the year it was supposed to come out, I’ve been wanting to see it.
The combo of the actors in the movie set it up for some kind of obscure glory in my mind, especially because I tend to like the movies both Song Kang-ho and Lee Byung-hun tend to do. But because of a combination of classic procrastination and COVID-19, I never ended up seeing it.
Until now. One day I was just wandering the DVD section of my library and, in our miniscule international cinema section that I didn’t even know we had until this moment, I found a DVD copy of Emergency Declaration.
I stood there, contemplated it, and then decided to check it out. I then procrastinated on watching it even more and then I finally did one stormy Saturday night.
The takeaway here is that Emergency Declaration did not live up to the hype I had imagined in my head.
Onwards with the review!
An act of biological terrorism occurs on a flight from Incheon to Hawaii—forcing everyone involved to make some quick decisions.
We begin Emergency Declaration by setting up the various backstories that are going to culminate into the events ocurring on the screen. Park Jae-hyuk, portrayed by Lee Byung-hun, is with his daughter and is flying to Hawaii with her, but he has a fear of planes for a reason that only becomes glaringly obvious later on—in a convenient plot point, too.
Song Kang-ho’s character, Gu In-ho, has a wife heading to Hawaii on the same exact flight without him. He’s a detective and at the beginning of the movie, they’re investigating a potential biological virus that has the potential to spread throughout the country. A corpse of a man is discovered not too long after the opener, and he died of the manmade virus.
Then we have Im Si-wan’s character, Ryu Jin-seok, the primary human antagonist in Emergency Declaration. He’s the son of a famous biological person working at a global health company, and, from the beginning of our time with him, we can see that he’s kind of unhinged.
He slut shames a woman working at the front desk of an airline, while also acting erratic. He wants the fullest flight possible, setting up the creepy vibes.
When he books a flight, his vibes get even worse after he starts talking to Jae-hyuk’s daughter in the middle of the Incheon Airport, upsetting Jae-hyuk. Jae-hyuk then keeps an eye on him because how strangely Jin-seok is acting.
We learned earlier that Jin-seok was in the bathroom because he cut open his armpit and shoved the capsules containing the virus in there so he could smuggle it on the flight.
The detectives on the ground realize that Ryu Jin-seok is carrying the virus through their work, then discover he has boarded a flight to Hawaii—the same exact one that Jae-hyuk and In-ho’s wife is on. We cut back to the plane. Jin-seok has begun his master plan by unleashing the virus in the flight’s economy bathroom, which a man inhales and later dies because of.
A flight attendant going to investigate the weird powder and scent he had discovered, gets infected, makes the pilot’s dinner, and then gets the pilot infected.
Thus begins a circus on the ground and in the air. The flight has been deemed a biological terrorist threat, so when more people are getting more infected by the minute, the passengers self-quarantine. The ironic part here is at the beginning of the movie, the virus time of infection to death seems pretty quick and lethal, but by the end of the movie, people who should be very much dead by now are still alive.
The South Korean government gets involved, the plane is forced to turn around in Hawaii, but now there’s very much a concern about fuel because the plane didn’t have a chance to get more fuel in the process.
At this point, Jin-seok is dead, having infected himself with his own virus. This is the sad part about the movie to me because he was one of the only compelling characters and moments. He was very interesting as a person, and that was the best acting in the movie if we’re going to be honest. After the moment he offs himself in the name of his agenda, the movie simply becomes too repetitive.
Then the infected pilot dies, causing the plane to plummet at one point. Just as it’s about to hit the ocean, Jae-hyuk saves the day. Turns out his plane trauma comes from the fact he was a former pilot, and the co-pilot knows Jae-hyuk and they have some major beef.
The movie then spirals into this repetitive back and forth between In-ho and the government officials trying to find out what to do, the passengers slowly freaking out over their impending deaths before coming to peace with the fact they’re going to die, and then Jae-hyuk and the co-pilot sweating up front.
That’s basically the movie at this point. They’re turned away in Japan to up the stakes a bit more, and when they try to land, the Japanese government literally launches missiles to shoot down the plane because they see it as a medical threat.
There’s a moment in the end where the passengers and pilots decide to go down with the plane when they run out fuel to no longer be a threat to humanity, but the ending is a bit open-ended.
I could see how someone could interpret it as they all died, but I saw it as they all lived, got the antidote, and meet up every so often to reminisce.
And that’s Emergency Declaration, folks.
Overall Thoughts
As a disaster movie with some thriller and terrorist elements implemented into it, Emergency Declaration just doesn’t work. It starts to lose its footing after the antagonist dies, then falls into the trap of repeating the same elements over and over again, making the movie pretty hard to watch after a certain point.
There are some philosophical musings injected into the story to try and make it work more as a contemplative piece, but then it simply doesn’t translate well because of how the first chunk of the movie builds up a certain amount of suspense and tension.
It’s also too long—that’s part of a major problem here because of how it lacks the tension and pacing to keep it going, so audiences aren’t going to walk away satisfied.
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