Product Description

It is AD 924, at the end of the United Shilla Dynasty. Continuous riots sweep the land ruled by a corrupted government. Evil forces are rampant and malicious demons roam the land. YI Kwak, born with the powers to see spirits, joins the royal demon hunting squad, Chuh-yong-dae after losing his fiancee, Yon-hwa to evil demons. YI Kwak excels as the most talented warrior of Chuh-yong-dae and the royal squad seems to gain momentum as powerful fighters against the forces of darkness. Then one day, YI Kwak drifts into Joongcheon, the world of the dead through a strange shrine. Joongcheon, the intermediate world between Heaven and Earth, a place souls remain for 49 days, preparing for reincarnation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #104176 in DVD
• Published on: 2007
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: DVD Region, NTSC, Widescreen, Subtitled, Color
• Subtitled in: English, Korean, Chinese
• Running time: 102 minutes

Features

• 1 disc pack (region 0 NTSC)

Customer Reviews

Beautiful visuals carry this Korean WUXIA fantasy epic...
The RESTLESS(aka: Jeong-Cheon) is the latest in South Korea's foray into the Fantasy- epic-romance/WUXIA Swordplay genre. This fantasy-adventure can definitely charm the viewer because it looks amazingly beautiful. The set designs are superb and the action is very entertaining.

Jung Woo-Sung(Musa the Warrior) is Gwak Yi, a former Chuyongdae(Royal Demon hunters) who after an encounter with demon-hybrids to protect a village, unexpectedly finds himself in Mid-Heaven, a pseudo-Buddhist holding where deceased souls gather to wait 49 days for their eventual reincarnation. There, Gwak Yi meets So-Hwa(Kim Tae-hee), a heavenly deity who is assigned an important task. So-hwa must deliver the so-called "Holy Stone" to the "Pool of Reflection" in order to prevent evil-doers from upsetting the balance between Earth and Heaven; if they succeed no one will be reincarnated. Noble and fearless, Gwak Yi enlists in Son-Hwa's cause immediately but he has his own hidden motivation.
Son-hwa is a dead ringer for Gwak Yi's former love Yon-Hwa, who he failed to protect from an untimely death. Actually, they are the same being, Son-hwa is a "Chuneen", whose a deity with no recollection of their past life on Earth. This complicates matters for both Gwak Yi and Son-hwa even further when Gwak Yi's former comrades(led by Hur Jun-ho)as a "Chuyongdae" are the ones who threaten the stability of Mid-Heaven. Meaning that in order to help Son-hwa, he must once again send his former comrades(to whom he owes a debt of honor) in the earthly plane to suffer a second death.

People who love SFX-laden epics will no doubt embrace "The Restless". There is plenty of action and they are very enthralling, thanks to the top-notch visual effects and awesome fight choreography. Highlights include a cool forest fight, and the very awesome epic finale, where Gwak Yi takes on about 10,000 demonic warrior spirits all by himself.(Azumi and Casshern, eat your hearts out!). The CGI effects are well-done and is sure to impress PS3 fanboys. The set designs are awesome and stunning.

The story itself is not very original, but quite bearable. It is about Love and Hate, promises and loyalty, good and evil. The costumes and set designs may remind audiences of Tsui Hark's "Legend of Zu". The film's main WEAKNESS may be that the plot/characters may have a difficult time connecting with some viewers. The two leads do a decent interpretation of their characters. Jung Woo-sung suits the character of Gwak Yi, while lovely Kim Tae-Hee fills the screen with her charisma.

I bought the KOREAN (region-3) 2-disc Special Edition when it came out a month ago. Korean released dvds have such good presentation, which is why it's no wonder they're expensive. Great DVD from CJ Entertainment.
Take note that dvds made in Taiwan(like the unofficial ones circulating in Amazon)may be compressed in a way that may freeze in most stand alone players. They are encoded with no region coding to fool U.S. players.
PICTURE: 2.40 ratio Anamorphic Widescreen. The video transfer is phenomenal, sharpness and detail is awesome. Colors are very vibrant and the flesh-tones are very good. No complaints.
AUDIO/Subtitles: 5.1 Dolby Digital-Ex and DTS-ES Korean Language track. The sound is POWERFUL(especially on DTS), the channels are very nicely separated. English Subtitles are well-timed and translated.
EXTRAS: Music video, commentary, "making of", Behind the scenes, trailers and more.., unfortunately there are no subtitles in most of the docos.

CLOSING REMARKS:
The Restless may not be wholly original but it is a very well-made feature. You can really tell that they spent most of their budget in the visual effects, costumes and set designs. It is worth seeing and is quite entertaining. Fans of Wuxia Swordplay epics will definitely embrace it for the action, if not, for it's beautiful visuals.

RECOMMENDED!

A real let down...
***************Mild Spoilers********************

I have to say I was fairly disappointed with The Restless. Having read a wonderful review about it, and an interesting synopsis, I was hoping that this movie would be as good as my favorite Korean epic, Musa.
The story focuses on Yi Gwak, a demon slayer who is poisoned by a group of villagers who intend to kill him and collect the bounty on his head. He manages to escape, and passes out. He wakes up alive, but in Midheaven, the place where souls go and stay right before reincarnation. There, he meets a white reaper, who resembles his long dead wife. The plot gets complicated when his ex-squad of dead demon slayers show up chasing after the wife. Apparently she has something they want.
Unfortunately, the interesting plot is just about all this movie has going for it. The two lead actors were kind of dull and had no chemistry. Dare I say the acting even borderlined on bad? The fight scenes were redundant and cliched. They were all typical of your average Wu Xia films. The female lead tries to fight, gets overpowered and the hero runs in to save her... not once but SEVERAL times. In fact, in ALL of her fight scenes that's how it ends up. And the ending has the obligatory one man against a gazillion soldiers that he cuts through with relative ease. And some parts of the films just flat out DRAGGED. The dialogue was quite boring, leaving the characters very two dimensional.
That being said, the special effects were pretty. There was even one memorable and touching scene of a close up of the hero's friend as he dies, turning into this burning paper.
But unfortunately, special effects alone can't carry a movie.
So needless to say, I'm still searching for that wonderful Korean epic that will blow Musa out of the water.

Mehhhhh...
Warning: Spoiler Alert!!!

The story...

This is just a general collective that I gathered from watching this movie. There wasn't a lot of really descriptive dialogue, so if I have one or two (or ten) things off key...blame the lack of explanation.

As far as Fantasy films go, I thought that there was a good general idea behind this one; a lone demon slayer named Yi Gwak finds himself in "midheaven", a spirit world of sorts, where he's caught in a conflict between "evil spirits" and "reapers".

The evil spirits are a troupe of demon slayers whom Yi Gwak was formerly associated with in the human world. And the reapers, I would describe as "Valkyries" of sorts who bring human spirits into midheaven.

The strange coincidence about the conflict is that the evil spirits were Yi Gwak's friends and allies before their deaths in the human world. They're lead by Master Ban-Chu, who Yi Gwak formerly held in high respects.
The reapers on the other hand, (also known as "Chuneen"), are lead by a spirit with the appearance of Yi Gwak's former wife, Yon-Hwa, who, upon becoming a reaper, has lost all of her worldly agonies and memories.

So it's kind of a moral struggle or so to speak. Should Yi Gwak align with his brotherly band of demon slayers, or the amnesiac spirit of his wife?

A few bad notes...
The lame-factor ensues here when Yi Gwak discovers that his friends have all turned evil for a seemingly unknown reason. I'm given the impression that they mindlessly follow the orders of their master, Ban-Chu, with no questions asked.

Yon-Hwa, who goes by the title So-Hwa (now that she's a Chuneen), is basically the victim of the conflict. So-Hwa's master asks her to carry a special stone that has the power to open a portal between the spirit world and the human world, and So-Hwa herself states that she's only a pupil, and that she's unfit to carry out such a task. Lo and behold, she really is unfit!

Throughout the entire movie, So-Hwa is being rescued by Yi-Gwak! Somehow I was lead to believe that the Chuneen were not an easy opponent, but apparently...they suck at everything they do!
It's their job to keep midheaven safe, and at the start of the movie, we see them failing to do so when midheaven is overrun by demons! So-Hwa, who's the absolute wrong person for the task of carrying such an important relic, is nearly taken out during every single fight scene in the movie! Fortunately enough, Yi-Gwak is always there to rescue her. Cliché cliché!

A few more nit-picks...
Bad Chemistry...
My biggest complaint is that we're lead to believe that Yi-Gwak and So-Hwa are supposed to have some kind of romantic relationship together...it's blatantly obvious that they're supposed to fall in love, despite the fact that So-Hwa has no memories of him...
Unfortunately, as another viewer mentioned, the actor and actress who play Yi-Gwak and So-Hwa had absolutely NO chemistry together.

Bad Costumes...
This is usually the last thing that I look at when I'm watching flicks such as this...But for some reason, the costumes all seemed really out of place, even for a fantasy movie. Yi-Gwak was the only character who accurately dressed the part of an untidy demon slayer. Yon-Swa on the other hand was dressed in what looked like...some kind of wedding dress. One of the evil spirits from Yi-Gwak's former demon-slaying troupe wore almost the exact same dress in a different color. And if I didn't have a high def t.v., I would have thought that the bad guy who was wearing a silver mail was actually wearing sequins.

My last beef with this movie is that it was really hard to watch without raising my eyebrows every time So-Hwa snarled her lip. Yes...throughout the entire movie, she was crossing her eyes, and snarling her lip.