Blue Swallow (2005) User Reviews

a very good production !

[lorexys · 8/10 · 14 March 2006]

If you love story about heroes and plane, if you love movie with beautiful pictures and great music "blue swallow" is for you ! If you love great actors who know to join smile and tears this is again for you ! The story of this little lady who dreams to be the first Korean female to become a pilot is very moving. Made of smile, tears, love in a difficult historic context. The actress is charming with her face's expression and her capacity to play the strong woman and the minute after the fragile lover girl...

I recommend this movie if you want to discover the Korean cinema.

Not a display of special effects, just a mix of feelings for this "blockbuster" !

A typical Korean romantic comedy/historic,/tragedy with other the top action

[flingebunt · 6/10 · 29 December 2006]

In the period from about 1900 to the end of World War II was an interesting era for stories of strong Asian women. Blue Sparrow tells the story of one such woman, Park Kyung-won, one of the first female pilots in Asia and one of the best.

Her life is one of great tragedy and She remains a controversial character in Korean today because she learnt to fly in Japan during the period when Korea was occupied by Japan.

Controversy and tragedy are usually a formula for success in the Korean domestic box office, so we have to look somewhere to understand why this movie was a failure.

While the movie is entertaining enough, it lies more into the realm of modern Korean romantic comedy for most of the movie with the flying scenes feeling a little over the top. Then suddenly throw in a tragic ending.

Certainly it makes stories of Western female aviators rather dull and uninteresting. For someone who didn't know anything about this person, I felt entertained. However for anyone knowing the person the movie would be rather unappealing with the sufficient depth of story to really entertain people.

Starts Slowly and Gradually Builds

[Xiayu · 7/10 · 27 May 2006]

Blue Swallow (Cheong-yeon) is the dramatised story of Korea's first female aviator, played by Jang Jin-yeong. The movie is uneven in tone, with some rather poor direction and a somewhat inadequate script. It doesn't seem to know what kind of film it wants to be, which is a real pity - it has all the ingredients for a top class drama.

The story begins in her village early in the 1900's, where it's established that she is predictably downtrodden and ill-treated by her father. He wants to pull her out of school and put her to work; she argues that her life and education is just as important as a boy's. This must have been outrageous conduct for a little girl in turn of the century Korea, but not much is made of it, because suddenly, there she is in aviator training school as though it were the simplest thing in the world to accomplish. A brief mention over drinks of the four years of technical study it took to get herself there is woefully inadequate. In order to appreciate her journey, her struggles need to be shown more fully.

There seems to be little or no sexism, and she is treated the same as any other pilot. In fact, she consistently outdoes her male co-trainees, and they appear to accept her readily. This doesn't seem at all realistic, even in the context of a "boy's (girl's?) own" type of film such as this.

Later, however, she enters into an affair with a free-wheeling young man, played by Kim Joo-hyeok, and things take a very serious turn. All the dreamlike qualities of the first half disappear. The then current political situation with Japan is shown in quite graphic detail in some surprisingly grisly torture scenes (that wouldn't have been out of place in Old Boy), and the Japanese methods of manipulating public figures for political gain is portrayed quite effectively. This is really the first time that you are able to care for any of the characters, and though it comes a little late, it's a tribute to the actors that it's still enough to leave you with a sense of real loss and despair for them.

For all its flaws, it's still well worth seeing.

A film that had potential to be great.

[sho_a_s218 · 9/10 · 9 March 2006]

"Cheong Yeon" was a film that played in Korea during December 2005, and ended with an audience of approximately 500,000. Now, 500,000 viewers usually makes a deficit, even for low-budget movies, and "Cheong Yeon" was a big-budget movie that had an audience of 500,000. Hearing about its devastating flop, I always wondered how bad the film could be. It turns out that the film has a beautiful story, but was flawed by a poor director, who seems to have written a poor script. There were some scenes that were completely unnecessary and broke the flow of the film (i.e. an unnecessarily long vomiting scene from over-drinking). Some of the characters' lines sounded a little awkward. Finally, the computer graphics were unconvincing. It was especially obvious when the main character is in the air. However, despite these flaws, the acting was decent, there were a couple unexpected twists, the story was great, and the song during the ending credits adds more sadness to the ending. Despite its numerous flaws, the film's good traits make me give the movie nothing less than a 9, but most people will probably give the film a 7 (or maybe even less) because of its flaws.