Loosideu Deurim
Watch Lucid Dream on Netflix
Written by: Kim Joon-Sung
Directed by: Kim Joon-Sung
Starring: Ho-jin Chun, Soo Go, Suk-ho Jun
Rated: TV-MA
Plot
In this Korean language film, an investigative journalist tracks his son, abducted three years ago, through the use of lucid dreaming techniques.
Verdict
While the dream sequences make this unique, it also makes me wish this had the fantastic design and scale of the dreams from Inception (2010). Stripping the dreams from this make it more logical, but also robs it of any attempt at excitement. This is a bland mystery movie dressed up with sci-fi.
Skip it.
Review
Three years pass and the journalist just now researches how to find missing children? This is the equivalent of the main character happening to see the exact thing they need advertised on a bulletin board. They should have made the lucid dreaming a flashing banner ad. That way it seems new, instead of making it seem like he waited around for three years and decided doing nothing wasn't working and then Googled it.
This isn't dubbed and the subtitles aren't great. Characters speak a paragraph's worth of information and the subtitle is the equivalent of, "I don't know." While I know I missed something, it's not detrimental to the story. That's not the problem.
Memories change when accessed. This is why eye witnesses aren't always reliable. They can be influenced. I wished the movie had explored that. It could have tied into the mystery. The mystery the journalist is tracking would be constantly changing because he's changing the memories just by accessing them.
This uses dreams to access memories, but the dream parts are rather bland, not until the end does it embrace the ability to manipulate dreams. Even then, it just made me want to watch Inception instead.
I doubt he'd be able to interact with his memory and deviate off course. He only has it from his point of view, to walk around in this memory means he's deriving false data from the memory or making assumptions. In his first 'trip' it seems like the dream has no boundaries,. The 'scientist' tries to address boundaries, but they seem very lenient.
Of course lucid dreaming causes nose bleeds because anything in movies that deal with the mind cause nose bleeds. No dream movie would be complete without a dream hacker who babbles about matching frequencies to enter the dreams of others.
This is big on fiction and low on science. It doesn't have to be accurate for me to believe it, but this doesn't even try to fool me. This is somewhat entertaining but highly implausible.
The journalist's "check" in the dream world is that the second hand of his watch won't move. This seems to be lifted from Inception, where characters had a totem as a check. The watch second hand seems odd. I've always heard you can't decipher text in a dream, using that as a check at least marries this to an established idea and could create more tension as he wonders if he's in dream or not. The movie doesn't try to derive any tension from that confusion.
This has a few twists and then wraps up so neatly it's annoying. Not that it's any worse than any other part of the movie.
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