Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Leofwine_draca This lacklustre disaster flick should have been so good: it features tremendously good special effects scenes of 100-metre high waves tearing through a city, laying waste to anything and everything in their path. These scenes alone are among some of the best bits I've ever watched in the whole disaster genre; destruction and mayhem on a massive scale, with carefully-crafted CGI bringing the chaos to full and authentic life.It's a shame, then, that the surrounding movie is so poor. Tidal Wave takes an hour to get to the disaster stuff, and until that time we're treated to…Korean comedy. Now, I don't mind a bit of comedy, the quirkier the better; THE HOST had a lot of fun moments. But this comedy is something else, the comedy of ridiculous characters behaving ridiculously, almost on a sub-slapstick standard. The over-the-top acting is absolutely appalling; I avoid American comedies on principle but this is even worse than those.Of course, disaster movies always have to build up to the disaster, and I fully understand the need to develop the characters before dropping them in the clag. But, in my mind, the film should always be about the disaster, even before it occurs: have characters making warnings that are unheeded, or build suspense and foreboding with minor events preceding it. DANTE'S PEAK is a case in point of how to achieve this. TIDAL WAVE sits in a completely different, and entirely superfluous, genre until the actual disaster occurs.Once the chaos gets underway, things get a lot better, although there's a reliance on overwrought melodrama which will test the patience of even the most hardened viewer, I imagine. Endless scenes of characters facing death, drawn out in painful slow-motion and with maximum crying, screaming, sobbing and telling each other they love them. Such scenes are a personal pet hate of mine, and they threaten to overwhelm the film even when the going gets good. It's a real shame, as with access to those special effects TIDAL WAVE could have, and should have, been a true great.

bababear Mel Brooks came up with a rule of thumb that I consider essential: don't make your movies longer than 90 minutes, because that's the longest a person can make one box of Raisinets last.The tidal wave doesn't enter the scene until over 70 minutes in, and at least 30 of those minutes could go. The story introduces a large cast of characters (and it's sometimes hard to figure out who's who), puts them in place in Busan, South Korea, and then unleashes the water.It's well photographed and there's a very well done scene where numerous characters are united by their watching a huge fireworks show over the harbor. The director is comfortable using the wide screen format, and does a very good job handling scenes with large crowds of people on screen.And the event, when it comes, is impressive- I wish I could have seen this in a theater instead of on my computer monitor.We have stock characters. The young man beset by guilt, his mother, and his would-be girlfriend; a scientist and his ex-girlfriend and her daughter- and of course he's the little girl's father but doesn't know it; a very nice guy and the poser girl he falls for who hangs out with airheads; and a real estate developer who wants to replace the funky shops and restaurants on Busan's waterfront with a sterile, soul-dead mall. You can pretty well figure out who lives and doesn't. And there was a scene where two characters are on a roof talking while another wave approaches and I wanted to shout, "Head for the stairwell and find an interior room on the top floor on the side of the building opposite the ocean!" Nobody listens to me.But because the pacing is so slow we begin to wonder how, in a city with a population of almost 4,000,000 people, characters happen to run into each other so often.Probably the best scene is a large set piece on a bridge after the first wave has struck. A slacker I'll call Odious Comic Relief survives the deluge, then is caught up in catastrophic events involving flying guy wires that snap loose from the bridge, falling vehicles, and finally a huge fireball. Imagine Chuck Jones directing WILE E. COYOTE IN HELL with the forces of water and gravity replacing the Roadrunner.It's rated R almost entirely for totally unnecessary foul language. There's is, of course, action violence- but if you're looking for another HOSTEL this isn't it.Should we evacuate the city? We can't! The Cultural Fair is going on!! But we've got to. Lives are at stake here!Think the screenwriters saw JAWS? No, I'm sure it's just coincidence.

disturbedmoose In South Korea, 'Haeundae' has enjoyed a somewhat baffling popularity. Despite having almost no redeeming qualities, it has become one of Korea's top grossing films. Part of this popularity is due to 'Haeundae' being the first disaster movie that the country has made. They've seen New York and L.A. get pummeled plenty, but never home. Additionally, while a tidal wave is the kind of disaster Americans reserve for a movie of the week, the immediacy of the disaster makes it more effective to the home audience than something that threatens the entire planet.For perspective, the American '2012' was released in Korea with the usual pomp and ceremony, but failed to impress because of its lack of story. It wasn't believable, so the Korean audience disconnected. A tidal wave is real, possible and precedented; which goes a long way in explaining the film's popularity in country where Science-fiction is just another crazy thing that the Japanese do.That said, this movie is actually really, really bad. It's not painfully bad; sitting through the film is not difficult so much as pointless. The first hour of the film is spent on a lot of campy story arcs. They are all drippingly melodramatic and are ultimately just lazy. There's the woman whose father died in the last big storm the region faced. She's in love with a guy who worked with her father and, secretly, blames himself for the man's death. (This kind of layered family drama is central to most of Korea's modern-era dramatic TV series.) Then there's the slacker friend whose mother keeps trying to find him a job. Slacker guy's younger brother is a competent lifeguard who saves a vapid, conniving tourist girl from drowning and she quickly becomes infatuated with him. The film gives us the obligatory scientist who sees the disaster coming, but is unheeded. The scientist is divorced and his biological daughter doesn't know who he is, yet completely by chance runs into his ex and the significantly younger man she's dating.If you're keeping score, that's three unresolved romances, three family conflicts, two life-changing secrets and zero natural disasters. In true movie-of-the-week form, the first half of the movie is a chess game of the filmmakers putting pieces into position for the most emotionally devastating finale they can. Unfortunately, anyone who has seen more than two disaster movies sees exactly what they're doing and it's difficult to take such blatant and artless tear-jerker set-ups seriously.After Slacker ruins things between Daughter and Guilt-guy, Lifeguard realizes that Tourist-girl is probably psychotic, Scientist gets mad at Ex for leaving Little Girl unattended, and Slacker's Mom sets off to buy her son nice shoes for an interview; we get the tidal wave which feels less like a disaster than sweet relief from the two-dimensional melodrama we just spent an hour sitting through, wistfully guessing which of the undeveloped stock characters is going to die.The special effects sequence is passable, but lackluster as it is over way too fast (though you sort of have to expect that from a tidal wave) and the rest of the film is people trying to get rescued from the ensuing flood and a second, aftershock wave. The emotional power of these scenes is undercut by a lot of elements; not surprising, given the weak build-up.The actors spend most of the film either being way to earnest or looking like even they can't believe they're doing this. Uhm Jeong-hwa, who turns in powerful performances in her other films, looks glazed and contractually obligated for the entire film. The defining characteristics of each character, most of which are negative, are shoved so violently down our throats that it's impossible to care about any of them.**Here be SPOILERS** Slacker escapes falling wreckage in a sequence that looks like it was ripped straight out of Looney Tunes. Lifeguard sacrifices himself in a move that seems less "heroic" than "I've finally escaped the crazy girl". Scientist and Ex stand on top of a building and are killed by the second wave when, by the film's own logic, they could have survived by simply running to the nearby stairwell. A pair of dress shoes float by implying that Slacker's Mom died and that it is kind of his fault, even though she was just as likely to die if she had been at home. The film closes with Daughter and Guilt-guy getting it together and Daughter immediately turning into a shrill, whining harpy. **End Spoilers**Disaster films is that they are about two things: 1) the cheap thrill of CGI destruction and 2) the emotional impact of that destruction. 'Haeundae' delivers neither. The destruction is over too quickly and the one extended scene involving destruction (see Spoilers above) is a slap- stick routine. There is no emotional impact because there is all of one likable character and he is surrounded by such unlikable people that death looks really attractive.The film does avoid a lot of non-sequiturs, keeping things coherent, if thin. So, the film saves itself from being painful to watch by being predictable in a vaguely comfortable kind of way. It's dull and shoots itself in the foot repeatedly, but could be enjoyable for B-movie fans and people who appreciate the over-the-top Asian style.

alienworlds I have seen quite a few Asian films from many different countries in Asia and this one was by far the worst one I have ever seen. Seriously marred by bad acting over 75 percent of the time, the concept of a Tsunami movie was buried beneath ten feet of choppy unrelated inconsequential events. I was not sure if it really was about a Tsunami until near the end-it seemed to be mostly about nothing but a raving alcoholic imbecile with a little boy. I would not recommend this film to anyone.Compared to The Host, a recent Korean horror-Sf film, Heaundea, comes off like a terrible commercial for international travel, as in, this is one vacation you would not want to take.