‘Hope’ Has One of the Most Joyous Mid-Credits Scenes I’ve Ever Seen

I saw Hope last night, and Neon’s new sci-fi action epic has to be seen to be believed. Find the biggest screen possible, with the loudest sound. If you have a Dolby showing near you, go.

Na Hong-jin, the filmmaker behind The Wailing, has made something spectacular. It’s nothing short of mind-blowing, bringing back a sense of awe that I’ve been missing from cinema for years. Even The Odyssey didn’t make me feel this way.

Unfortunately, I think the marketing had to reveal a little too much to sell it. Going in blind is the best way to experience Hope, so before I get into why I’m writing this, here’s what you need to know: go fucking see it, and stay for the scene during the credits.

Major spoilers for Hope, including its ending and mid-credits scene, follow.

What Hope does so well is confine you to a small place and give you a really big idea. Modern blockbusters can take us across the planet or to the far ends of the universe, but there’s something immediately involving about watching an unimaginable threat descend on a community that feels lived in. You can understand the place and the people before trying to wrap your head around what’s happening to them.

I felt echoes of Predator, Alien, Aliens, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day throughout. But a huge part of what makes the movie work is its humor. You need those releases when you’re putting an audience through this much.

There’s a sequence bridging the two halves of the movie where a character recounts his alien encounter while explaining, at ridiculous length, the diarrhea he suffered after eating some old pork. It goes on and on. It’s absurd, and my theater was in tears laughing before we jumped right back into the action.

That same willingness to be completely ridiculous gives us the character I haven’t stopped thinking about: Sung-ki, played by Zo In-sung (Smugglers, The Great Battle), who takes an absolutely unbelievable beating and somehow keeps going.

This guy gets his ass handed to him by an alien. He’s thrown through the woods into trees, beaten to a pulp, and still manages to stand up, pull a knife, and prepare to go another round before he’s saved.