It's kinda a detective story that retells a true story about research fraud in South Korea and how a celebrity and national hero was shown to be a giant fraud having tricked the scientific community worldwide with fake research. It's for sure worth a watch no matter the issues with it.
Hwang Woo-suk was the "Pride of Korea". The country was one of the poorest countries in the world after a giant civil war where USSR and China created North Korea and tried to take all of Korea until USA and UN did 99% of the military work for South Korea and created the country. They were dirt poor and needed an identity and riches fast. Hwang was a low-tier academic, but extremely charismatic and seemingly produced amazing research at his private lab with animal cloning and other groundbreaking work. He decided to hire a Western researcher who had contacts at a Western journal called Science and this researcher forced the publication of 2 papers Hwang couldn't publish himself. But when he finally published his human research something about the results seemed to good to be true and much was unexplained. It was later shown that both papers were faked.
The film shows how a South Korean investigatory TV show uncovers the giant hox and how South Korean people attacked them for it as they were going after a national hero. Hwang made sure to use other media to attack them too. This is sorta too on the nose in the movie. It's too melodramatic and the small attacks are made into giant events that cause the good guys to whine and sour in childish ways and even at times run away from interviews like spoiled teen girls. Everything looks grey and dark and the movie is overall ugly, but with good camera work. It's meant to look gloomy even though we don't see a single person with a gun and the journalists are perfectly safe at all times. They also focus on the South Korean TV story only and ignore everything else. In reality a Western journal called Nature had a journalist look into it initially. It's a shame they ignore all the other people who did much of this work. This overdramatizes how much this single TV show did and this choice makes it look overly fake even though in reality most of this did in fact happen it was just not this small and gloomy.
The movie never becomes great. As with most South Korean movies there are a ton of scenes hastily put together in a frantic manner often skipping storylines and points and you kinda need to know the story to understand what is going on at all times. Plus many actors have the same haircut and it can be hard to distinguish them. South Korean TV often focuses on many characters and interactions without focusing on a clear story. It's very smart TV, but it's not easy to get it right. Western TV would never in a million years get it right more than maybe 2 times a year while South Korean TV kinda stumbles around in it getting much of it right yet never clearly telling the story itself. This means that the movie lacks storytelling and is lacking 10 steps behind another fraud case shown in The Dropout where journalism was also a key factor. As a TV show it gets to go into details and show the single people while here we just rush through the story and even the very first scene shows that we are quite far along into the investigation and it never lets up.
I would for sure recommend exploring the story as all of this did happen and many may not remember the events. They do overdramatize events. I'm not sure the PD Su-cheop TV people stole lab material or that so many people nearly died. The journalists do a ton of stuff that seems quite unlikely and track down a million things themselves. Stuff that various random people did in real life. But again, it was likely done to dramatise the story and make it fit for a movie as you can't randomly shown a random person online figuring out that the photos in the papers were duplicates. It's also quite nice that the bad guy is just a dude who errored in his ways and not a cruel psychopath - he is a real person here. Though him promising handicapped kids to their face that his research will make them healthy is quite evil. And in real life he and his team stole a bunch of research money which this film also overlooks.
Hwang Woo-suk was the "Pride of Korea". The country was one of the poorest countries in the world after a giant civil war where USSR and China created North Korea and tried to take all of Korea until USA and UN did 99% of the military work for South Korea and created the country. They were dirt poor and needed an identity and riches fast. Hwang was a low-tier academic, but extremely charismatic and seemingly produced amazing research at his private lab with animal cloning and other groundbreaking work. He decided to hire a Western researcher who had contacts at a Western journal called Science and this researcher forced the publication of 2 papers Hwang couldn't publish himself. But when he finally published his human research something about the results seemed to good to be true and much was unexplained. It was later shown that both papers were faked.
The film shows how a South Korean investigatory TV show uncovers the giant hox and how South Korean people attacked them for it as they were going after a national hero. Hwang made sure to use other media to attack them too. This is sorta too on the nose in the movie. It's too melodramatic and the small attacks are made into giant events that cause the good guys to whine and sour in childish ways and even at times run away from interviews like spoiled teen girls. Everything looks grey and dark and the movie is overall ugly, but with good camera work. It's meant to look gloomy even though we don't see a single person with a gun and the journalists are perfectly safe at all times. They also focus on the South Korean TV story only and ignore everything else. In reality a Western journal called Nature had a journalist look into it initially. It's a shame they ignore all the other people who did much of this work. This overdramatizes how much this single TV show did and this choice makes it look overly fake even though in reality most of this did in fact happen it was just not this small and gloomy.
The movie never becomes great. As with most South Korean movies there are a ton of scenes hastily put together in a frantic manner often skipping storylines and points and you kinda need to know the story to understand what is going on at all times. Plus many actors have the same haircut and it can be hard to distinguish them. South Korean TV often focuses on many characters and interactions without focusing on a clear story. It's very smart TV, but it's not easy to get it right. Western TV would never in a million years get it right more than maybe 2 times a year while South Korean TV kinda stumbles around in it getting much of it right yet never clearly telling the story itself. This means that the movie lacks storytelling and is lacking 10 steps behind another fraud case shown in The Dropout where journalism was also a key factor. As a TV show it gets to go into details and show the single people while here we just rush through the story and even the very first scene shows that we are quite far along into the investigation and it never lets up.
I would for sure recommend exploring the story as all of this did happen and many may not remember the events. They do overdramatize events. I'm not sure the PD Su-cheop TV people stole lab material or that so many people nearly died. The journalists do a ton of stuff that seems quite unlikely and track down a million things themselves. Stuff that various random people did in real life. But again, it was likely done to dramatise the story and make it fit for a movie as you can't randomly shown a random person online figuring out that the photos in the papers were duplicates. It's also quite nice that the bad guy is just a dude who errored in his ways and not a cruel psychopath - he is a real person here. Though him promising handicapped kids to their face that his research will make them healthy is quite evil. And in real life he and his team stole a bunch of research money which this film also overlooks.