‘The Tower’ is a Christmas Disaster Movie With Heart
It’s Christmas Eve and everyone is gathering at Tower Sky, an enormous, 120-story residential and commercial building in Yeouido, Seoul. While Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Sidney Prescott quiver, Lee Dae-ho (Kim Sang-kyung) and Seo Yoon-hee (Son Ye-jin), a building technician and restaurant manager respectively, scuttle about, planning the building’s annual White Christmas party for tenants, politicians, basically the whole who’s-who of Seoul. All the while, a ragtag band of other residents and workers shuffle into the frame. There’s Young-cheol (Jeon Bae-soo) the foolish (and frankly irritating) chef, and there’s Mr. Kim (Lee Han-wi), a religious fanatic and new resident.
Contextually, the party’s being planned, with the requisite breadcrumbs for inevitable disaster being left behind. The sprinklers aren’t working on account of frozen pipes, and helicopter pilots are resistant to a party stunt on account of possible updrafts that high up. Jim Ji-hoon’s The Tower might stick pretty closely to the disaster movie playbook. However, when the titular tower goes up in flames, it proves to be anything but. Terrifying, emotional, and plain fun, it puts Western disaster flicks to shame.
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Alongside the likes of Kim Seong-Hun’ Tunnel and Roar Uthaug’s The Wave, The Tower is one of the century’s premier disaster outings. While it maintains Hollywood’s preeminent disaster interest in ridiculous, credulity-straining destructive hyperbole, its human elements ground its soft-retread of 1974’s The Towering Inferno. After the real estate talk, quaint humor, and invariable quirks are introduced, disaster strikes. At the River View tower, the party is in full swing. There are fireworks and choppers carrying huge crates of fake snow. Those damned updrafts from earlier do make an appearance, sending one of the helicopters crashing into the tower. It bulldozes through several floors, eventually igniting in the middle of the building.
The initial spectacle is more gruesome, less rubbery Hollywood. Sure, the falling shards of glass and collapsing steel beams look hokey up close. But the human-centered chaos is nowhere near as turn-off-your-brain exciting as seeing Patrick Wilson fight against a moon monster. People are crushed like something straight out of Nicolás López’s Aftershock. As dozens of guests flee into the elevator, it collapses and stops midway down on a burning level. The survivors are cooked alive, their shoes melting into the floor, their skin peeling against the hot metal. Fifteen minutes before, The Tower was making dog poop jokes.
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After the initial explosion and fire, The Tower pays dividends with the brief introduction of several firefighters, including Sol Kyung-gu’s Captain Kang Young-ki, a man who simply wanted to get his wife a cake that night (and trust me, the final shot of that cake is a bonafide tearjerker). As the firefighters storm the building, grappling not only with Tower Sky’s pretty ridiculous structural integrity but also a fire commissioner (Kwon Tae-won) whose mantra appears to be “save the rich, let the poor burn,” The Tower becomes a kind of hardboiled, machismo foray into the dynamics of, well, fighting fires. It’s cool stuff, and Captain Kang Young-ki would give Fire Force’s Captain Akitaru Ōbi a run for his money with all his sickly sweet talk of saving human lives.
A disaster movie might not seem the perfect watch for Christmas. But in terms of genre-equivalent movies that strike that same simple horror chord as the best of them, it more than satisfies. It’s got that burning Christmas spirit (alongside a few charred corpses), and its moments of sheer violence rival the best of what Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees can do. Plus, as noted, it’s pretty danged great.
Once the peripheral need to be pleasant subsides, The Tower is pretty grim. It’s a noteworthy interrogation of how disaster response is triaged, with those having means and resources (and power) prioritized over the most vulnerable among us. Let the pregnant woman die, the commissioner says—we’ve got a rich lady and her dog to save. It’s not unconventional for a South Korean flick (both Tunnel and Bong Joon-ho’s The Host make no qualms about augmenting the ineptitude of their government). Here, however, it is rendered fresh when presented in something so ostensibly crowd-pleasing.
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The Tower won’t make a fan out of any disaster movie naysayers. But, within the vast world of international disaster flicks (of which I have somehow found myself enmeshed in), it’s one of the best. It has more convincing special effects than Tidal Wave and more gravitas than Skyfire. It’s good people learning the meaning of Christmas while their world literally burns around them. Be kind. Be good. Help others. And, if your commercial tower doesn’t have any water in the sprinklers, maybe get that checked out.
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