Sector 7: 3D [Blu-Ray]

As of late, the South Korean film industry has been releasing a seemingly endless stream of beefed-up, big budget, ersatz blockbusters that awkwardly emulate American cinematic tropes. Some of these releases attempt to analyze and assess the genre they tackle (The Good, The Bad, The Weird), while others merely go through the motions in an effort to emulate the studio trash that defines America. Director Kim Ji-Hoon's 3D action ode to the scientific exploration admonitory genre, Sector 7, falls comfortably into the latter category, coming off more like rip-off trash such as Deep Rising than its intended goal of a work like Aliens. Embarrassingly, it doesn't even reach the heights of Renny Harlin's smart-sharks actioner, Deep Blue Sea. Set on an oil platform, the film follows a small group of workers desperately trying to find oil beneath the sea in the titular Sector 7, noted as a politically contentious area between Japan and Korea. As is the norm with this genre, the group is led by a fiery lass named Cha Hae-Joon (Ha Ji-Won) and rounded out by several stereotypes, including the high-pitched, bumbling oaf, the sexy female biologist, the goofy scientist in a lab coat, the good looking man that loves the leading lady and the hard-nosed captain of the vessel. Once these archetypes are developed and the gang discovers oil and weird, luminescent, subterranean fish, a giant monster pops up and inexplicably hunts the gang one-by-one without any clear motivation. That, in a nutshell, is the premise of the movie. Unfortunately, the storyline is all over the map and, at times, the gaping holes in the plot are wide enough that you have to wonder if pages of the script went missing during production. The film prides itself on its visual special effects and usage of 3D. However, the computer-generated monster actually stands out in the 3D environment as blurry and cartoonish, making the peril at hand often laughable. And even though the entire film was shot using 3D cameras in an effort to make it a visual feast, the bad lighting and lack of technical aptitude (the director never utilizes spatial dimensions, making the 3D effect fall flat, serving no purpose) ensure that even aesthetic entertainment is minimal. The special features that are bundled with the disc could have been packaged as a single "making of," but were instead spread out in four chapters. We get a glimpse of how 95 percent of the film was shot with the use of CGI, but most of the segments focus on the actors talking-up the film and coming right out and telling viewers to love it. It only solidifies the failure of this production, as seemingly even the actors were embarrassed by the finished product.