Review of Wonderland / 원더랜드, directed by Kim Tae-yong

Lately I’ve been on such a movie grind. In the summer of 2024 I spent several months in South Korea on a State Department Critical Language Scholarship, which meant I was fully funded to study Korean in Busan for a bit. I had a blast while abroad in Korea, but then I came home and waited for a visa that would never come to go to my next destination.

While I waited for that doomed visa, I ended up watching a lot of movies. I was missing Korea a lot during this time, so I would gravitate towards Asian movies and dramas for a hot minute. That’s why if you go on my blog lately, it’s mainly just full of reviews of Asian content. Go check it out if you’re into that!

One of the many movies I wanted during this time was Wonderland. It had just come out when I am typing this, although you’re going to see this way in the future due to the sheer amount of backlog I have to get through on this site. And I procrastinated on it for a little bit, then managed to get myself together and watch it.

I think what interested me the most about it, if we’re going to be honest, was the fact that it had an all-star cast. But if there’s something to learn about this, it’s that an all-star cast doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good movie.

Let’s get into the review before I start rambling too much.

People in the real world can connect with their loved ones, not letting them move on and creating other problems.

In this movie, the main premise is that people from the real world can connect with the dead through a form of artificial intelligence, or AI. There’s a solid argument to be made that these aren’t the real people—they’re constructed based on how they were in their lives, making them pretty darn close to the real person.

We first meet archeologist Bai Li, who is in the desert doing her job. She makes calls to her daughter consistently, telling her that she’s going to come home and visit soon. As we learn later, Bai Li is actually dead, and this is the AI form of her, but for right now we don’t know that.

Her daughter is taken care of by Bai Li’s mother, who is becoming agitated by the service. In the world of the AI, Bai Li befriends Song-youn, who converses with her and listens to what she has to say.

We also meet Jeong-in, a flight attendant, who uses the AI to call her boyfriend Tae-joo. He’s an astronaut and can be seen floating in space as he talks to her, and the real Tae-joo is in a coma. He’s just woken up in the real world, but she notices he’s not the same person as he was before.

After we meet them, we also meet the people working at the company. We’ll cut to them throughout the film.

There’s Hae-ri, a manager, who makes calls to her parents. She works with Hyeon-soo in a case where a grandmother calls her dead grandson, but the grandson is still managing to exploit her in the world of the AI. Eventually, she will die and the grandson is devastated and deactivated.

There’s also another case involving a man Hyeong-soo thinks is his real father, creating another C plot throughout the film.

On Bai Li’s mother’s end, she wants to end the service soon and tell her granddaughter, which she fights about with Bai Li (Bai Li is unaware she is just AI, but thinks that she is being cut off from her daughter). At the same time, Tae-joo is acting like a completely different person, and Jeong-in prefers the Wonderland/AI version of him.

Tae-joo eventually becomes suspicious of what Jeong-in is doing, and then discovers what she’s been up to with the fake version of him when he shows up to the airport as she prepares for a flight. At the gate, he tells her goodbye and leaves, putting their relationship to a potential end right there.

Bai Li’s mother decides to move back to China and take her granddaughter with her. As Jeong-in and Tae-goo fight about their problems, the granddaughter goes missing, putting the grandmother in a panic. Bai Li finds out in the simulation and drives to its border, creating glitches in the entire system.

The team at Wonderland tries to stop her, but she manages to get into the airport’s network. Tae-goo finds the daughter and helps her reconcile with her mother’s death. She goes with her grandmother, and later Jeong-in and Tae-goo sort out their problems and she deactivates her subscription.

The film ends with Hyeon-soo introducing his mother to the AI version of his real father.

Overall Thoughts

With a better script, I feel like this could have been a better movie. The way the film is right now is way too jilted and there are several plot lines, which would suit a television show more than a dramatic film. I was scratching my head trying to untangle all the plots, and wishes we got more time with one over another.

The themes introduced are really interesting though, and the actors did a good job with what they were given. However the structure of the movie itself is such a big problem that we can’t really navigate through it. It can be quite a drag to get through at the end of the day.

If you enjoyed the film, let me know why! I’m curious. I didn’t find it too great in my book, and also thought there were some pacing issues throughout. The dialogue is also a little weird. I thought I was tripping when Gong Yoo and Tang Wei started speaking in English—I immediately went to check the settings to see if I was on Korean mode.

Go watch this if you’re interested though. Don’t let one bad review stop you!

Follow me below on Instagram and Goodreads for more.