“We’re galaxies that lighten the dark stage”

Using music as a plot device, first-time director Choi Jung-han puts dreams and friendships under the scanner in his debut work “Galaxies”.

Eun-soo, Eun-ha and Dong-eun are three friends who form the band Eun-Ha-Soo, literally “Galaxies”. Eun-soo and Eun-ha are a couple who ran away from a music production company to showcase their individuality but, not least because of their age and said individuality, labels find them highly unmarketable and the three struggle to make ends meet. When Dong-eun, who is known to chronically invest in bad stock, takes and invests the band’s savings, loses it all and runs away, the angry Eun-soo and Eun-ha, who had let him stay in their apartment when he fell behind on rent, take an old guitar of Dong-eun’s and sell it on a marketplace. However, when Dong-eun returns with the money, they must trace back the guitar, which holds a lot of sentimental value to Dong-eun, and reunite him with it. 

Through the story of these three middle-aged friends, Choi Jung-han, who co-wrote the script with Ha Won-joon, partly takes a look at the nature of one’s dreams and the price one has to pay to achieve them. The three are adamant on keeping their originality and identity, such as it may be, even if it comes with a lack of success and financial hardship. Choi, however, keeps things fairly positive and light despite the circumstances, using comedy for this effect. The comedy doesn’t always land though, with a lot of gags just proving a little inadequate for the occasion. The payoff of the irritable bowel syndrome running gag, however, is effective. 

The second half of the feature is dedicated to the trio’s efforts to reclaim the sold guitar and the writing falters a bit here. While their adventures are interesting and often funny in their setup, some key elements are forgotten or disregarded along the way, like Dong-eun taking advance pay from his new job and never returning to it, for example. In addition to the adventures they have to go through to find their guitar, the internal journeys that the three have to go to find themselves as they meet all the various characters on their way to the guitar and, by extension, find their music as well is an interesting element of the story and one that works the most. The feature is in fact at its best when it is about the trio’s music. 

Choi manages to enlist a trio of dependable character actors to play his lead bandmates. Yoon Je-moon, probably the most well known of the three, is always a joy to watch and “Galaxies” is no different. An actor who’s known to do both comedy and even villainous roles convincingly, he gets ample scope to shine here, as Dong-eun has one of the better internal journeys of the three, which Yoon portrays impressively. Kim Ji-hoon, who mostly does bit-part roles but is probably best known for playing Helsinki in Netflix’s “Money Heist: Korea – Joint Security Area”, is fun to watch as Eun-ha, and is called upon the most to provide comedy to the proceedings. Lee Shi-ah, meanwhile, may best best known to K-Drama viewers but is adorable as Eun-soo. The matriarch of the group, her outbursts in her own cute way are hilarious.

Despite being a story about music and musicians, the music in “Galaxies” is somewhat of a letdown. The background score is appropriate, but none of the songs manage to register as impressive, or even hummable. The ones in the beginning of the film are understandably so, as the story demands it, but the couple of songs that appear later on do not leave much of an impression. The bright cinematography, on the other hand, does impress, with the images being vivid and immersive throughout.

Ultimately, as far as low-budget productions go, “Galaxies” is a perfectly cute film and a breezy time as a whole, but it is not without its faults, particularly in the writing department, which do bring the overall enjoyment of it down and are complicit in the feature failing to leave a lasting impression.

Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction Part 2 is a film I never want to watch again. However, this is not because it’s bad. Rather, it’s a testament to just how incredible this film is.

The film is full of well-developed and memorable characters—especially its lead trio, Ouran, Kadode, and Ooba. It’s wonderfully animated—combining cartoony character designs with ultra-violence to create something shocking and memorable. To top it off, it has incredibly strong themes conveyed with maximum impact through excellent storytelling.

What makes it hard to watch (or want to rewatch) is the simple fact that it feels too damn real. Despite the aliens, UFOs, super-lasers, and Doraemon-inspired gadgets, this is a film that is bound and determined to drag humanity and modern society into the spotlight—to use sci-fi trappings to put our blemishes on full display.

The central conceit of Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction is the idea that humans can (and will) get used to anything. Even when confronted with a world-changing event—like, say, the existence of alien life or a UFO floating above Tokyo for years—humanity as a whole doesn’t change. Instead, we just go on about our lives as usual. If it doesn’t directly affect us, we put it out of our minds.

This film kicks it up a notch from the first by showing that even things like public genocide are passively accepted by the masses. Even those who feel compelled to act do so with things like peaceful protests—basically doing nothing to directly help those in need, all while convincing themselves that they’re heroes fighting oppression. But then again, what is there that they can do? This film perfectly captures the masses’ self-righteousness and utter helplessness in the face of the apathetic, the powerful, and the government.

The movie is a damningly pessimistic look at humankind as a whole. The world is full of things we can’t control. People driven by their zeal or self-interest will crush the weak underfoot—never noticing or caring about those they’ve destroyed. In such a world, our only hope is to find something we care about and do all we can to protect it. That is the beautiful yet horrible message of this film.

While this story is full of villains and innocents, it’s hard to say there are any true heroes. Oh sure, we may sympathize with Ouran and Ooba, but the two of them ultimately have a body count that surpasses government genocide squads and vigilante alien killers alike. Yet, throughout the film, we root for the pair. If nothing else, we can see that they are working for, if not altruistic reasons, then for human ones that we can understand on a deeply personal level. Love is their driving motivation—even if they’re forced to accept the cost of that love by the time the credits roll.

In the end, Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction Part 2 is a powerful film that will leave you depressed about the state of the world. It puts the foolishness of humanity on full display and concludes that there is no easy fix—that no force, internal or external, will appear and make everything alright. All we can do is take our happiness where we can get it—and sometimes, we may find ourselves in the right place at the right time to make things just a little bit better.

…Or maybe we’ll die horribly due to events wholly outside of our control.