Read @ Joe’s

Title: Project Silence (2023) Director: Tae-gon Kim Writer: Tae-gon Kim // Yong-hwa Kim // Joo-Suk Park Studio: CJ ENM Studios // Blaad Studios // Capelight Pictures IMDb Plot: An accident occurs on a foggy bridge and, as a result, an unknown beast is unleashed. Joe Says: Project Silence makes for a fun time, but it is entirely too silly.

Tae-gon Kim’s latest, Project Silence, is a mash-up of multiple genres as he presents Sci-fi, Horror, and Thriller all in one appetizer-free sitting. Placed on South Korea’s famous Incheon Grand Bridge, Project Silence offers a disastrous fog, a helicopter crash, snapping tension cables, toxic gas, political conspiracy, military action, and, oh yeah, genetically-engineered dogs that, once let free, go on a killing rampage. Too much, the old adage goes, is never enough.

Except here. 

The disaster film underpinnings laden with monstrous beasts and sci-fi trickery is indeed all too much. Certainly, Project Silence makes for a fun time, but it is entirely too silly.

The Grand Bridge connects Seoul with its Incheon airport. Both the bridge and the airport are beautiful wonders and should be seen if your traveling permits. The characters in Project Silence do not get that chance as a dangerously thick fog blankets everything. The pea-soup sightlessness results in a serious multiple car crash that includes a tanker carrying a load of toxic gas, and a military caravan transporting canines that were part of an experiment gone wrong. The open gas infects one side of the bridge as the killer mongrels congregate on the other. When SWAT comes to the rescue, their copter, through eye-rolling coincidences mostly relegated to horror films, crashes into the bridge. Before you can say “Holy Irwin Allen, Batman,” its blades begin cutting through key tension cables, causing a section of the bridge to buckle.

Project Silence riffs on the disaster film genre, taking the movie to ridiculous lengths. Tae-gon Kim along with writers Yong-hwa Kim and Joo-Suk Park (Train to Busan) build up the cast of complex characters – an elderly woman dealing with dementia, a young golf star, an annoying gas attendant – and mix in a healthy amount of family drama involving Jeong, a young diplomat from Korea’s Blue House (Parasite’s Lee Sun-kyun) and his pre-teen daughter, Kyeong (Train to Busan’s Kim Su-an). 

Character affairs aside, having mutant dogs, a collapsing bridge, and government cover-up all vying for the camera’s eye only results in dividing the strength of the individual subplots and subtracting any emotional attachment. Sacrifices made from entrapped victims should have carried more weight than the casual shrug certain scenes produced. South Korea’s head of security (Kim Tae-woo) works through a definitive character arc, but feelings of regret, shame, and even heroism are not properly built. Even the CGI dogs are neither fully menacing nor weepingly pitiful. Like many on the bridge, they simply exist to service a suitably entertaining plot.

What made Train to Busan so electric, swatches of gore aside, was the perfect amount of tension connecting the passengers and the undead threat. There was a level one-to-one ratio cutting both survival and death. The editing of multiple plot threads into one thrilling story can be accomplished, too. George Lucas masterfully oversaw the editing for The Return of the Jedi where three separate battles – on Endor, in orbit, and on the Death Star – brilliantly fed into each other. Granted, Jedi involved pre-established characters working in known environments heading towards a predictably-heroic climax; all useful elements that Kim could obviously not employ. 

Instead, Kim delivers a suitable action movie with the banality of a Jerry Bruckheimer production containing plenty of explosions, crashes, chases, and cheesy deaths. Yet for a movie whose intention was to villainize man’s best friend, Project Silence’s leash was held too tight.