The first act had me. A plane takes off for Hawaii, a passenger starts behaving disturbingly, and people on board begin dying without explanation. With Lee Byung-hun, Song Kang-ho, Jeon Do-yeon, and Yim Si-wan in the cast, I was expecting a top-tier disaster thriller. The problem arises when the film splits in two. Every time the tension rises inside the plane, we cut back to the ground, to a crisis room where they repeat explanations we had already understood. Yim Si-wan is great and the cockpit scenes are powerful, but the editing cuts that momentum over and over, and you really feel the two-and-a-half-hour runtime. And then there's the final stretch, which devotes so much footage to a moral dilemma about collective sacrifice, resolved in a way that I found more uncomfortable than exciting. I don't regret watching it for the actors, but it's the first Korean film of this scale that I wouldn't recommend to someone just starting out with Korean cinema.