Film Review: Galaxies (2024) by Choi Jung-han

“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.