Anarchists (movie)
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Anarchists is a South Korean action movie, made in 2000 and directed by Yong-sik Yu and written by Park Chan-wook.
Set in 1924 Shanghai, the movie is about an underground cell of anarchists who are attempting to overthrow the Japanese Imperial Government's control of the Korean peninsula through propaganda by the deed.
Told from the perspective of the youngest charecter years after the fact, the story is a sympathetic look at a group of young revolutionaries through the eyes of one of their own.
In the opening scene the protagonist is saved from execution in a raid performed by the anarchist cell he would afterward join. The group attempts to teach him the tricks of their trade and soon he takes part in several missions. However, after one of their members is killed during a mission and their funding dries up, the group leaves its larger organization and attempts to survive on its own, earning money through gambling and bank robbery. Over time the group becomes agitated with simply scraping by and several voice a desire to return to their old ways of clandestine warfare. They collectively decide to strike at the Japanese government in a high profile attack, leading up to a dramatic finale.
A movie about the practicalities of survival, the passion for the good fight, and how these two things are sometimes at odds; it attempts to portray the anarchists with respect, but falls prey to martial art film clichés. The charecters act less like anarchists and more like a crew of mafia hitmen out to take down the system in overacted, slow motion gun battles. Little about anarchist philosophy is actually explained, much less why the individual charecters would be attracted to it, though clear referinces to anarchist writers such as Kropotkin and the origins of the word anarchy are made. One scene between the anarchists and their funder also touches on the relationship between anarchists and socialists and the split that occurred between political factions after the Russian Revolution of 1917, as a result of which many anarchists became socialists.