Robert Haydon: Response to Oldboy

Oldboy is the perfect example of a Non-linear timeline and it will keep you wondering what's going to happen next. The first scene opens to present time and he is holding a guy by his necktie threatening to drop him of a building, while you are watching you are wondering why he is going to kill this guy and right before he does it jumps 15 years to the past to show you why he is going to kill him. In the first 30 seconds there is already a time line jump.

Oldboy has a very deep plot. To go over the plot real quick this is what happened Woo-jin Lee kidnaps Dae-su Oh and keeps him prisoner for 15 years so he can brainwash him. Dae-su breaks out of this prison and meets up with this girl who he has a love affair with, but little does Dae-su know that that is his daughter. Dae-su goes on a hunt to find his capturer, when Dae-su find him he is given the option to find the reason he was imprisoned with in five days or his mistress will die. Dae-su eventually finds out the secret and to why he was imprisoned. The whole movie is full of twist and turns and the way that Dae-su just plays into Woo-jin's plan just shows how brilliant Woo-jin was.

Dae-su Oh was a crazy character and Min-sik Choi captured the characters profile perfectly in the movie. To be a good actor you got to make the audience believe that you are the character, and it cant be easy to fool the audience into thinking you are a crazy incest breeding guy. I had no complaints with the other characters other than Woo-jin Lee who in my opinion should have been played by a more insane actor because Ji-tae Yu who played Woo-jin came off as being a calm quiet character until the end where he was still acting pretty calm.

Oldboy had some spectacular camera angles expecially in Dae-sue's big fight scene in the hallway where Dae-su is ambushed. The camera angle chosen for this scene was a high shot the purpose of this shot was to make you feel like you were observing the fight rather than being in the fight. I personally like it when the camera is at eye level in a fight scene because it makes you feel like you are apart of the fight too, (Fight Club does this the best) but an eye level shot would have made you feel like you were fighting Dae-su so the high shot was the best for this scene.

The fight scene in the hallway is a scene that a lot of other kung-fu or fighting movies chooses, where the main character fights 10 or 20 other characters in a huge fight to death scene. When the Dae-su walks out of the room he standing face to face with about 10 people who are pissed at him seeing that he is out numbered you lose hope, but then Dae-su starts taking each of them down one by one. This scene toys with your emotions because unlike a lot of other films this one has its moment when you absolutely think Dae-su is screwed, like when he is pinned down starts getting kicked by all 10 of the guys, but then he just gets back up again and starts kicking more butt.

Overall this was a great movie, the plot was a little more twisted than the average movie I watch, but it worked.