The Tower

A Christmas Eve party is thrown in a luxury skyscraper in central Seoul. The building's owner ignores warnings about faulty systems, and then the helicopters hired to spray artificial snow lose control, hit the tower and start the fire. The film is not interested in the disaster itself. It is interested in the silent assumption about who deserves to be saved: the rich on the upper floors and the staff below burn in the same building, at the same moment, with very different odds. The form follows the genre handbook. A large cast is introduced, everyone is given a family tie, and then they start being picked off; the lift, the glass facade and the water tank sequences are built from moves borrowed from the genre's classics. Kim Ji-hoon's film is generally described as an indirect remake of John Guillermin's The Towering Inferno from 1974. It was made for $9.3 million and took $36.4 million, opening on 25 December 2012, the day after the one in the story. Sul Kyung-gu plays the firefighter, with Son Ye-jin and Kim Sang-kyung in the other leads. It runs 121 minutes. Who it is for: disaster movie fans, and anyone who wants Korean action with the emotional register turned up. Who it is not for: viewers who avoid melodrama. The film lingers on its deaths and pushes the score all the way up at every moment of sacrifice.