Noryang: Sea of Death

Sorry for that and no pun intended. Wave games better? Probably not - also even more removed from the show I took to make a joke ... than the stories here .. both Korean at least. But leaving that aside for a moment.

There are more of these movies (General this, General that) ... but it is quite enlightening to watch this one. It may take a while to get started (almost an hour I believe) ... but once it does ... well it goes all out ... on sea! And then some ... the sea battles might be the best ones put to film yet! The last 90 and more minutes are incredible to say the least.

So the visual bombardment (sorry) of it all is quite winning (I mean ... it was right there) ... and all that with the background of being historic ... and I reckon somewhat accurate at least? You have an added bonus scene after the credits roll ... which is important to know - even more so when watching on a streaming platform that tries to force the next thing on you ... therefor making you miss this, if you do not watch ... well out! Over and out!

Entire movie is talking, talking, talking, translating from Chinese to Korean, adding the time of this movie to be a lot longer. Fine, this is how it actually happened, using translators. Then 30 minutes of amazing battle scene and then 20-30 minutes of slow motion of the battle scene that completely killed the entire movie. Why? Why waste my time slowing everything down for that long? I guess the director and the editor keep falling asleep when they watch the movie and forgot to edit things out or dragged the slow motion and fell asleep. At a certain point the battle becomes repetitive, the scenes of people's reaction is beyond repetitive. The banging of the drum should be normal pave to keep the momentum of the fight and then gradually slow it down. But nope.. total one hour wasted watching this 2 hours and 30 minutes movie.

As a history lover, the movie was painful to watch from beginning to end. Sure, artists can take certain liberties while telling a story, but nothing in the movie was true to what actually happened.

The order of battle of complete nonsense. The portrayal of factions completely one dimensional: the Japanese are all demonic and fanatical, the Chinese are cowardly and useless,. The Koreans are all heroic and invincible. If that was true, why did the war drag on for seven long years in the first place? How did they manage to lose almost all the land territory without Ming China's help?

At any rate, a thoroughly disappointing movie. More of a caricature than anything else.

I am from Belgium and little ingorant to the history of Japan/China and Japan.

I didn't even know which sides I was watching at the start of the movie.

However that became clear when I kept watching.

This is a movie about a massive sea battle that took place around 1600. The costumes, the ships and the acting is all very well done.

The changing fortunes of battles kept me also engaged, however some tell its nog 100% historical accurate.

I loved this movie, I hope you will too.

There is not alot of movies that are purely about sea battles, this one if very well done. Even if alot of cgi was used, which you will see during the movie.

Korean filmmaker once again distorted history by portrayed their rightful and supremacy pride, dismissed chinese contribution.

The Chinese Ming's admiral portrayed as traitor and coward actually considered as hero in china and korea. He is griefing when hear the dead of admiral Yi.

Later his descendant even come to korea and become Gwangdong Jin clan. How his descendant feel when see this distorted movie discredit their ancestor ?.

In part I too (The Admiral: Roaring Currents), the director portrayed Admiral Yi's heroism with only 13 turtle ships when in reality he got help too from Ming's navy.