It isn’t often that someone dares to be different in Singapore, especially when it comes to making movies. Putting a film together is an expensive, painstaking process, and it’s completely unsurprising (and financially more sensible) that film-makers only produce movies that audiences will definitely want to see. If Singaporeans want fun, silly comedies or creepy horror movies, give it to them… right?
For better or for worse (generally for better), veteran television director Ong Kuo Sin has decided to call a Judgment Day upon himself and his début feature film. Is there room in our movie industry, he seems to be asking, for an ensemble drama that dares to forsake easy laughs in favour of asking deep, important questions about faith, love, forgiveness, religion and mortality? The answer, thankfully, is yes.
The concept is simple enough: a meteorite is well on its way to obliterating the whole of humanity, and everyone on earth has 72 hours to live, love and try to die without regrets. A Taiwanese reporter (Alice Ko) begs her husband (Tender Huang) to meet her in Singapore, only to break the news that she’s in love with her producer (Guo Liang). A painfully normal family man (Henry Thia) finally tells his family his deepest, darkest secret: that he’s always wanted to be a woman. A man (Chua Enlai) proposes to his girlfriend (Rebecca Lim), but is rejected in favour of an eleventh-hour trip to find a well they dug together in Cambodia. A cop (Wang Yuqing) confesses to his subordinate (Mark Lee) the true extent of his involvement in a decades-old corruption scandal.
That’s a lot of plot to pack into 104 minutes, but that’s hardly all. This is no Apocalypse Now: in fact, less than a third of the way into the film, the meteorite dissolves on impact, and our protagonists – all of whom make some pretty extreme decisions when they think they’re dying – now have huge messes to clean up once they realise that the world hasn’t ended after all. (That’s not really a spoiler, by the way: it’s right there in the trailer.)
As you can imagine, one of Judgment Day‘s biggest problems is its over-abundance of plot. With a handful of other subplots feeding into the four main storylines, the movie barely has time to breathe and really grow. Some of the more interesting stories and characters (Thia’s closet transsexual Liu Fu An) have to make way for the ones that are rather more tedious (Ko’s fickle reporter). As a result, the film has a curious tendency to feel both rushed and languid. The last-minute twist in its tale also leaves Judgment Day feeling a little bit hollow: it’s tough not to feel a bit frustrated by the trick Ong pulls in order to get his characters to arrive at the emotional endings they all need.
Character development is also patchy: Judgment Day imbues its characters with a lot more complexity than we’ve come to expect from local movies, but even so, depth and darkness are occasionally sacrificed, both to fit the running time and due to some oddly sitcom-y set-ups. Dr. Alfie (Jalyn Han), for instance, is essentially a plot device masquerading as an oddball supporting character; she winds up working overtime as Fu An’s life-long confidant, surgeon and strangely manipulative accomplice.
That being said, Judgment Day actually manages to do a pretty good job of engaging the audience in a way that many recent local movies have not. Although the script lets them down once in a while, Ong’s characters are facing tough choices that we all have to make eventually – the only difference being that we (think we) have the luxury of time. These notions of love, forgiveness and understanding keep the movie firmly grounded in an emotional truth we can all recognise and feel. It’s also refreshing to see a local film that portrays Singapore in all its linguistic heterogeneity: everyone speaks just as we do, in a unique mix of English, Mandarin, dialect and slang.
Ong’s enormous cast does some really impressive work. Stand-outs include Thia, bravely under-playing a part that anyone familiar with his comedic background would never imagine he could pull off; and Huang, who infuses some genuine heartbreak into his role as the inconvenient husband who comes to meet his wife at the end of the world.
In the final analysis, Judgment Day is far from a perfect local movie – but it’s certainly one of the better ones in recent memory. In daring to explore genres and ideas so different from the norm, Ong has created a film that has more to say than most of the formulaic comedies and horror movies released this year… put together. It would be interesting not just to get a hold of the director’s cut of this movie (to see how much backstory and depth has been left on the cutting room floor), but also to see what boundaries Ong will push with his next feature film.
Basically: It isn’t perfect, but overall, we think this local movie will pass muster come Judgment Day.
shawneofthedead 