[HanCinema's Film Review] "Pilot"

Jeong-woo (played by Cho Jung-seok) is the surprisingly unsympathetic lead character of "Pilot" who we're initially introduced to wearing drag and running away from an angry mob. No context could really make this seem sympathetic, and it's to the credit of "Pilot" that the movie never even really tries. Jeong-woo is a celebrity pilot who is undone by a viral video where he tries to defuse paternalistic sexism with supplicant sexism, which isn't really much of an improvement.

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Cho Jung-seok deserves credit for making this concept work much better than it should. "Pilot" is taken entirely from his point of view, and even includes those moments of self-awareness where Jeong-woo realizes that he probably isn't actually in a screwball romantic comedy, but his fellow pilot Seul-gi (played by Lee Ju-myoung) is so cute he can't help but forget. Incidentally, despite her prominence in the marketing, Lee Ju-myoung isn't really the co-lead. She's about as prominent as any other performer aside from Cho Jung-seok.

Other similarly such prominent performers include Jeong-woo's sister Jeong-mi (played by Han Sunhwa), who's about as unobservant as her brother, but where he is a talented pilot, she is talented with makeup tutorials. Then there's An-ja (played by Oh Min-ae), the mother of these two mostly amoral and unobservant children who's about as amoral and unobservant as they are. Yet even An-ja has her charms as a woman who'd rather have fun with her friends than worry too much about why Jeong-woo isn't returning her phone calls.

With 4,675,611 admissions at the South Korean box office this summer, "Pilot" was the biggest success, but not really a huge one by the historical ten million admission standard. It's easy to see why. Anyone who saw the marketing and assumed that "Pilot" was supposed to be a romantic comedy was inevitably disappointed. Jeong-woo isn't even all that convincing in drag, he just very quickly gets to the point where a lot of people have good reason to pretend like he is.

This basic farce, this mockery both of traditional media and social media in terms of image-making, is what makes "Pilot" a genuinely funny movie with a lot of great gags. It even has one of the better product placement bits in recent memory with a scene where a character tries, and fails, to destroy a phone that's suddenly making very inconvenient noises. That Jeong-woo is inevitably found out as a fraud is gratifying- he's stupid more than sinister, and even heroic if the situation calls for it.

It's hard to guess how much of this mostly optimistic absurdity will play outside of South Korea, though. In English-language spheres, the very premise of "Pilot" runs afoul of politically correct gender norms, even if the actual text of the script makes it quite clear that the socially constructed nature of gender is the only reason Jeong-woo's goofy scheme survives as long as it does. It's a subtle nuance for a film, any film, to convincingly portray that a man who's being asked for a divorce probably deserved it, and also probably isn't a monster.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Pilot" is directed by Kim Han-gyul, and features Cho Jung-seok, Lee Ju-myoung, Han Sunhwa, Shin Seung-ho, Oh Min-ae, Kim Ji-hyun-II. Release date in Korea: 2024/07/31.