Hijack 1971

In South Korea in 1971 you could smoke on board, nobody had an assigned seat and getting a bomb onto a plane was surprisingly easy. That's the world of 'Hijack 1971', which recreates the attempted hijacking of a Korean Air Fokker F27 flying from Sokcho to Seoul on 23 January that year. It's the directing debut of Kim Sung-han, an assistant director on '1987: When the Day Comes' and 'Ashfall', and the script is by Kim Kyung-chan, who also wrote '1987'.

It all starts two years earlier. Fighter pilot Tae-in (Ha Jung-woo) is ordered to fire on a hijacked airliner before it crosses into North Korea and refuses, because a friend of his is flying it. The plane lands on the other side, some of the people on board never come back and he's thrown out of the air force, while his friend's wife (Kim Sun-young) is branded a communist sympathiser.

By 1971 Tae-in is first officer on a domestic flight to Gimpo, alongside Captain Gyu-sik (Sung Dong-il) and flight attendant Ok-soon (Chae Soo-bin). Just after takeoff a homemade bomb goes off, Gyu-sik is left half blind and Yong-dae (Yeo Jin-goo), a young man hounded for years because his brother defected, demands they head for North Korea. With South Korean fighter jets ready to stop them, Tae-in faces the same dilemma he did two years before.

Yeo Jin-goo plays a villain for the first time, and Ha Jung-woo, the star of 'The Chaser' and 'The Handmaiden', shares the screen again with his 'Take Off' co-star Sung Dong-il. Nearly all of it takes place inside the plane, with a careful recreation of the early 1970s. It opened in South Korea on 21 June 2024 and passed a million admissions in ten days. Critics liked it, praising the tension and the period detail, though some wanted more from the passengers.

• Action
• Thriller
• Crime
• Aviation