Emergency Declaration

Emergency Declaration is a Korean action catastrophe movie that is at times so realistic it might fool you into thinking it's a documentary. At other times there are some quick fixes and heavy-handed plotting that are painfully obvious, so it's a bit of a rollercoaster.

For reasons never defined in the movie, a former biochemist Ryu Jin-seok (Siwan) self-implants something under his arm before boarding a crowded plane headed for Hawaii, where he uses an asthma inhaler to release the contents of the implant in a restroom. This turns out to be a deadly mutated virus that gruesomely kills the first passenger exposed to it, and quickly spreads to the rest. Passengers start to die.

When the pilot tries to get permission to land in the U.S. he's refused. The pilot then dies of the virus, and so does the terrorist. The co-pilot, Choi Hyun-soo (Kim Nam-gil) turns the plane around to head back to Korea, where police detective Gu In-ho (Song Kang-ho), whose wife is on the plane, is fighting to get a vaccine from the company responsible for producing the original virus. Meanwhile, there's also a disgraced pilot, Park Jae-hyuk (Lee Byung-hun), among the passengers on the doomed plane who has to take over flying the aircraft when the co-pilot becomes too sick to function.

There was a lot to like about this movie, despite the sledgehammer plotting and the story hole plugs. I think the last fifteen minutes are probably the best I've ever seen in a catastrophe film, realistically speaking. I would have liked to know why Ryu Jin-seok decided to kill everyone on the plane and himself, but like the motives of so many mass murderers we can never know, so that works, too. Available on Viki.com.