Noryang: Deadly Sea

Three different actors have played Yi Sun-sin for the same director. Kim Han-min started in 2014 with Choi Min-sik, from 'Oldboy', carried on in 2022 with Park Hae-il and closed the trilogy in December 2023 with Kim Yoon-seok, from 'The Chaser', in command of the fleet. 'Noryang: Deadly Sea' covers the Battle of Noryang, the last engagement of the Japanese invasions of Korea and the admiral's last as well.

Late 1598. Toyotomi Hideyoshi is dead and his last order was for his troops to sail home, so the Imjin War is ending through exhaustion rather than victory. General Konishi Yukinaga is penned in at Suncheon and wants nothing more than to embark without a fight, so he tries to buy safe passage from the Chinese admirals fighting alongside Joseon. One of them, Chen Lin, is tempted.

Yi Sun-sin won't have it. Letting the men who have wrecked the country for seven years simply leave means leaving the war half fought, and that is where his final campaign goes: into holding together an alliance that keeps slipping, and into working out where the Japanese relief fleet will come from. He sails at night to cut it off in the Noryang strait, with fewer ships and against an enemy who knows his tricks by now.

Jung Jae-young plays Chen Lin and Moon Jeong-hee the admiral's wife, in a huge cast where Baek Yoon-sik is the Japanese fleet commander Shimazu Yoshihiro and Heo Joon-ho the Ming vice admiral Deng Zilong. Shooting finished in June 2021 and the film took two and a half years to reach cinemas: post-production ran long and Kim wanted a winter release, the season the battle was fought in. At 152 minutes it is the longest of the three.

Five days before it opened, the South Korean navy held a screening of its own at the Second Fleet's base for some seven hundred people, sailors and their families. Then came the release, more than four million admissions at home and close to 34 million dollars worldwide, nearly all of it Korean: the American run covered barely thirty cinemas, and British screens got it at the end of December 2023. It was up for film, director and actor at the 2024 Baeksang Awards and won the Buil Award for art and technical work. The Korean press admired the scale of the sea battle and Kim Yoon-seok's work, and was a good deal harder on the script.

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