What’s New and Notable in 2024?

As the year comes to a close, let’s look ahead to coming attractions just around the bend (and far beyond). While I didn’t find a K-Drama to fall in love with in 2023, I’ve got a good feeling about next time! Plus, action heroines, prestige sci-fi, and American television!

Gyeongseong Creature
22 December 2023

From Netflix: “Gyeongseong, 1945. In Seoul’s grim era under colonial rule, an entrepreneur and a sleuth fight for survival and face a monster born out of human greed.”

I’m trying not to get my hopes up, because I’ve been burned countless times by Korean genre fare. Is it too much to ask that a title with the word “creature” might be an actual creature feature? Or is it just gonna be zombies, Korea? That being said, they might’ve broken their sci-fi curse just last year with the generic but entertaining Jung_E. Maybe there’s hope for Korean monsters, too. For example, Han So-hee wielding a period rifle?

Can you believe this is her first project since My Name? That was a very physical role, and she really committed to it. So it’s exciting that she’s still committed; she does it super well. My Name might’ve fizzled out in the middle, but those fight scenes are forever. I want to see Han So-hee fistfighting a monster (this is how I get burned).

Marry My Husband
1 January 2024

Who better than Park Min-young to kick off 2024, with Marry My Husband premiering on New Year’s Day (possibly on Amazon Prime). It’s definitely one of those weird show ideas, involving time travel, but the last K-Drama I watched was the stripped-down Doona!, so I could use some convolution.

Echo
10 January 2024

The above image caught my eye some time ago, like a piece of video game concept art shown at the Game Developers Conference. Who is this cool, angry badass, dressed like a Resident Evil character? The image suggests an entire universe of backstory and possibility — oh, what’s that? The Marvel Cinematic universe?

Yes, Echo is a character from the Daredevil comics, and the image comes from the show Hawkeye. I’ve mostly relied on cultural osmosis to stay up-to-date with the MCU, so I have the gist of what’s going on here. What I want — what’s most impotant to me — is that Echo is a violent character, and this is highlighted in the consciously hard-edged marketing campaign.

The serious-voiced narrator of the “Rampage” trailer growls, “Don’t miss Marvel’s most intense series yet,” and then we cut to Vincent D’Onofrio punching a guy. It’s a little awkward, with shades of “M. Night Shyalaman’s first R-rated film,” but as long as a character who looks as cool as she does gets to be as badass as a Marvel show will allow — I’ll be there.

Knight Flower
12 January 2024

See also: Knight Flower, though this one’s unfortunately described by the Korea Times as a comedy: “After her husband passes away, Jo Yeo-hwa (Lee Ha-nee) seems to be living a quiet, secluded life at home. However, in reality, she is living a double life, jumping over her house’s wall to help people in need. One day, she crosses paths with a handsome, senior officer, Park Soo-ho (Lee Jong-won), who gives her a new perspective and this leads her to follow her own dreams.”

Jo Yeo-hwa dresses as a ninja, in fact, and the kunoichi are the most criminally underrepresented cool thing in cinema history. Seriously, what’s cooler than a ninja? I think you know the answer. The 24-second trailer features one fight scene, and that very well could be the only one in the series. While I bristle against the contextualization of the action heroine in comedy, sometimes it can work. My Wife is a Gangster 3 and Caution, Hazardous Wife were great. I guess I’d prefer the action-comedy heroine evolve into that “I’m living with a dangerous woman” subgenre, but that’s a different discussion.

True Detective: Night Country
14 January 2024

From HBO: “When the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska, the eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace. To solve the case, Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) will have to confront the darkness they carry in themselves, and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice.”

There’s a strange part of me that will always be excited by the prospect of new True Detective, despite that the series bears no hallmarks and this upcoming season would appear to be a soft reboot. If anything, what makes a True Detective is an emphasis on the horror inherent to the police procedural, ensuring that characters’ reactions to every crime scene and break in the case are gloomy and apocalyptic. Basically, I’m looking for something fatally self-serious. But also pulpy, following the title.

This is the first True Detective without the involvement of its creator Nic Pizzolatto, and I’m certain the current showrunner Issa López is more than up to the task (isn’t this show actually beneath her?), but it’s still the fragmenting franchisement of what was once a creative spark. Regardless one’s feelings on Pizzolatto as a person, those first two seasons were his, and constitute a lightning-in-the-bottle success and a fascinating failure. One good, one bad, both interesting.

I might venture to say that his career has recovered since the triple hit of the first season press tour — where he was heralded as a wunderkind but came off as a prick — the critically disastrous second season, and the mythology about his feud with Cary Joji Fukunaga. The latter’s various testimonies suggested that he rescued True Detective season one from Pizzolatto, and we kind of believed it after having seen season two. But the director’s since been exposed as a man easier to dismiss (though he’s attached to next year’s Masters of the Air, so… wow). Meanwhile, Pizzolatto’s been turning in the kind of standard genre work he famously walked away from to do True Detective in the first place. (I guess just The Guilty, which was an okay movie). His contract with HBO ended early, so he’s out there like an injured baseball player.

Anyway, my only issue with Night Country is that I’ll be watching this show about a research station in an icy winter setting and secretly hoping that the Thing will pop out. Right? That’s the danger! By all means, come up with a more interesting setting than New York or Chicago, but that’s a sci-fi setting.

Dune: Part Two
1 March 2024

Speaking of sci-fi — indeed, its very avatar — next year we’ll get the second half of the Dune story, whose specifics remain a mystery to me (I’ve only read the first half of the book). These movies offer something unique: big-budgeted space opera that everyone involved takes very seriously. Like, Dune used to be the nerdiest shit ever, and now it’s an Oscar movie. More than just a big paycheck, A-list talent want to do this movie. You don’t get that from those American Godzillas.

Love Lies Bleeding
8 March 2024

I don’t remember exactly how I was first alerted to Katy M. O’Brian (presumably, The Mandalorian), but wow. Martial artist, police officer, bodybuilder — what, does she act as a hobby? Love Lies Bleeding could be a starmaking role for her, because it would seem to lean into something already true about the actress (that she’s, like, big and tough?). Maybe I’m just thinking of early Schwarzenegger, making the transition from bodybuilder to movie star. But if all goes well, the Last of Us season two fancasters might have their day!

Civil War
26 April 2024

Alex Garland continues his trend of making movies with titles that are usually subtitles: Appleseed Ex Machina, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, and now we have Captain America: Civil War. This is the one that I’m gonna avoid learning anything about, though I’ve already read headlines talking about how potentially problematic it is. I don’t know, man. Just yesterday, Garland was the toast of Hollywood — or at least, the toast of sci-fi fans who want something smart every now and then. Even if he takes a too-big swing, again, I’m looking for “interesting” more than anything else this year.

Ballerina
7 June 2024

And I didn’t say “notable” meant “exciting” necessarily, because, boy, this one’s tough no matter how you slice it (with a katana). It’s hard for me to get past “Why does this even need to be a John Wick spin-off?” If you said, “A ballerina has a gun,” I’d think back to a couple of Luc Besson movies before remembering it was a factor in John Wick: Chapter 3. So why isn’t this just a movie about a ballerina with a gun? Because the lesson of the John Wick movies is that they’re cool because they have an established world, but I could kind of take or leave that world. I prefer the political to the surreal aspects, that by not dying, John is disrupting a greater system and allowing for infighting, but the desert scenes are a little too much for me.

Beyond the world of assassin hotels, being a spin-off means that Ballerina will adopt the same kind of action, which is a mistake that a lot of action movies are making right now. John’s fighting style makes sense for his character, as someone perpetually fighting uphill (at times literally) against compounding absurdity. Let’s hope they come up with an approach to action that fits the new character. But even if they don’t, I mean, I have a pretty low bar for action heroines — and so rarely is it cleared.

Alien: Romulus
16 August 2024

For better or worse, it looks like “Alien 5” is dead. The original movies tell, in their accidental, tortured way, the story of Ellen Ripley, and that series should stand alone (unless, of course, you come up with a new subtitle configuration. No repeats!). Our collective attitude toward the medium of film has changed since that epic finale in 1997, where sequels are no longer linear, and movies themselves have cheapened thanks to the modern models of distribution. Despite that I liked The Matrix Resurrections, it isn’t lost on me how the once grand prospect of The Matrix 4 now exists and is forgotten. So, another Alien movie is another Alien movie. If it’s bad, they’ll try again later — setting aside the common wisdom that the bad Alien movies vastly outnumber the good ones anyway.

I’m reasonably sold on Fede Álvarez. His Unfortunate Blockbuster Detour was the bland Girl in the Spider’s Web, which wasn’t, like, a big turkey. I’m hopeful that his Alien, title pending, is a splatterfest like Evil Dead (2013), because that’s something missing from the series. Alien: Resurrection and AVPR have pretty gory body counts, but those are, you know, “lesser entries.” Whatever. I’d happily defend both!

Nosferatu
25 December 2024

More than one year from now, we’ll get the new horror film from Robert Eggers. This is another one I don’t know anything about, but everyone seems to be excited, so I will be, too.

Mrs. Ok
TBA

I just learned of Mrs. Ok today, and as of this writing, the link on Wikipedia is dead. But this is the next show starring Lim Ji-yeon, where she’s the title character. What’s it about? I know not. I can only hope that it takes advantage of her considerable talent. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was that she was playing the tech nerd in The Killing Vote.

Squid Game
TBA

As mentioned at the top of this post, Korean filmmakers are not great at sci-fi, and if Squid Game is a notable exception, they’re also not good at sequels. It’s only the rarest and usually American-funded K-Dramas that do a second season. Train to Busan 2 underwhelmed critics. And where’s The Host 2, fellas? So a second season of Squid Game is a test with high stakes. As great a show it was, one of my favorite parts was watching its ascendence in pop culture. My Korean New Wave gatekeeping was since long over. I loved seeing Squid Game everywhere, online and in person. But the quiet fear with anything that rises so dramatically is that it’s bound to fall. Coincidentally, we already talked about True Detective today.

It’ll be an uphill battle for creator Hwang Dong-hyuk, writing the sequel to a story that existed as a complete work for ten years in a fraction of that time. We all know why the second season will exist, and quality isn’t part of that math. Broadcast eight hours of The Yule Log and call it Squid Game 2, it’ll be among the most-watched TV shows of 2024. You only get to burn that match once, but it’ll burn good. And sophomore efforts are hard anyway. How many great season twos are there in general?

So I’m just as excited about Squid Game’s second season as I was the first: not very. But having gone back recently and watched the finale — considered one of the “bad” episodes — I was reminded that it is really, actually, a very good show. It isn’t popular because it’s a common denominator, just good enough and inoffensive to all. It’s stirring and shocking and tactile. At the very least, the second round of Squid mania might inspire those who missed it the first time to check it out.

Kingdom
Keep dreaming!