What’s the reason we love watching disaster movies so much? It’s an interesting question, because so many awful things happen to the characters in these movies and still we “enjoy” watching that. But when you take a closer look at the genre you realise that even though the disasters are an essential part, the thing we care most about is the human story, the focus on a small group of people, who despite the horror around them do everything in their might to survive or are willing to offer their lives so others can make it. Survival is part of our DNA and maybe that’s the reason we care so much for the characters.
Pandora is a South Korean disaster movie which is about a nuclear powerplant. Jae-Hyeok (Kim Nam-Gil) works in the plant and lives in the neighbourhood together with his mother, sister-in-law and nephew. He dreams of working abroad and making enough money to get his family away. The plant is already decades old and when an earthquake takes place something goes wrong. At various levels people try to do everything possibly to prevent the situation getting worse, but when at the highest level information is held back which the president of the country should know, wrong decisions are made making everything even worse. Both people working in the plant as those outside are forced to make some difficult decisions in order to survive.
The tension is slowly built and enough time is spent on introducing the various characters, making you care more about them. They have to endure quite a lot, making it a rollercoaster of emotions. The small victories, the big setbacks and the hope that they will survive. The focus shifts between the family members who try to get as far a way from the disaster area as possible and the men at the site who do everything possible in order to make sure it doesn’t escalate further. The sense of scale, that such a disaster would impact millions of people is convincing and visually there isn’t much the movie can be faulted about. The human story gets enough attention, making this feel realistic and far away with spectacle disaster like in movies as San Andreas.
In the Netherlands this movie is available on Netflix
