Resurrection of the Little Match Girl

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Movie: Resurrection of the Little Match Girl
Revised romanization: Sungnyangpali sonyeoui jaerim
Hangul: 성냥팔이 소녀의 재림
Director: Jang Sun-Woo
Writer: Jin-mi In, Jang Sun-Woo
Producer:
Cinematographer:
Release Date: September 13, 2002
Runtime: 125min.
Language: Korean
Country: South Korea

Plot

Hyun-sung Kim plays Joo, a glum delivery boy for a noodle stand with no direction in his life. His one big ambition is to become a video game jock like his yellow-haired friend Yi, who's raking in the bucks in tournament playoffs. After a peculiar set of circumstances, he realizes he's being invited to take place in a kind of massive multi-player game called -- what else? -- "Resurrection of the Little Match Girl."

This is some game. The Match Girl of the title (Eun-kyeong Lim, who looks a lot like a certain girl Joo has been bumbling around after) is the worst imaginable heroine. She drags herself from place to place, whining at people to buy her lighters, and eventually dies huffing her own product in some back alley. The object of the game is to rescue her, see, so that she will dream of you instead of someone else when she freezes to death. Somehow I don't see this tearing a lot of people away from EverQuest.

Joo plugs into the Game and is given his ID card, which will later be used to track him.

And yet people are logging onto the game in droves, as evidenced by the big table of players shown near the start of the film, and the fierce competition to steal the Match Girl away from people. Perhaps the point, as with Battle Royale, is that the game is supposed to be essentially stupid -- that for people to expend the time and energy they do in massive multiplayer on-line games is just silly, and the movie is mocking that impulse. The problem is that the mockery is founded in contempt, not affection or understanding, and is not grounded in anything. Battle Royale used its "game" as a Swiftian critique of the social fear of rebellious youth; Avalon covered much of the nature-of-reality material better. Match Girl is too dazzled by its crazy-quilt of ideas to have any coherent ambitions other than to pummel the audience senseless.

Once Joo plugs in, so to speak, the movie kicks into high gear -- but in twelve different directions at once, all of them equally arbitrary and therefore uninteresting. There's a lady warrior, Lara (as in Croft, ha ha), played by transsexual Jin Xing, who Joo sort of tries to apprentice himself to. There's various gangs of thugs with attitude to match, all trying to steal away the Match Girl and shooting up hectares of scenery in the process. There's odd figures lurking in the shadows, selling information and weapons to Joo, much as it might be in a real game like this. -- The Gline