The Great Flood Movie Review

 

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The Christmas vacation had just started, and with it came that familiar quiet permission to binge-watch without guilt. Between household routines and moments of rest, I found myself returning to something I have always loved—Korean films. The Great Flood became one of those watches that stayed with me longer than I expected.I have been a Korean movie lover since my school days. Films like Oldboy, I Saw the Devil, and A Moment to Remember shaped the way I look at cinema—not just as entertainment, but as emotional endurance. The Great Flood belongs to that lineage, though it speaks in a quieter, more contemporary voice.

On the surface, it is a disaster film, but the flood here feels less about water and more about accumulation—of fear, memory, guilt, and responsibility. What struck me most was how restrained the film is. There is no rush to overwhelm the viewer with spectacle. Instead, it lets dread seep in slowly, much like water entering a home you once thought was safe.Watching it during Christmas vacation, when days blur into one another and time feels suspended, made the experience more intimate. Perhaps that is why the themes of protection and survival felt personal. As a mother, I couldn’t help noticing how the film treats care—not as something heroic, but as something exhausting, repetitive, and deeply human. It reminded me of my own days, quietly arranging meals, cleaning up, making sure everyone else is okay before sitting down myself.The performances are controlled, almost understated, which I appreciated. Korean cinema has always excelled at this—allowing silences to speak. There were moments when nothing dramatic happened, yet I felt a tightness in my chest. That, to me, is good filmmaking.

What I liked most about The Great Flood is that it doesn’t offer comfort easily. Like many Korean films I’ve loved over the years, it respects the viewer’s intelligence and emotional patience. It doesn’t explain everything, and it doesn’t try to make tragedy beautiful. It simply lets it exist.By the time the film ended, I was sitting quietly, thinking about how fragile our carefully built lives are—whether in a flooded city or in an ordinary home where tiredness, love, and responsibility coexist. It felt like a fitting watch for a holiday season that is supposed to be joyful, yet often carries its own silent weight.For someone like me—who has grown up with Korean cinema, who values emotional depth over spectacle, and who watches films in between real-life pauses—The Great Flood felt less like a movie and more like a lingering thought.

By the end of The Great Flood, the idea of building an AI mother and child emotion engine feels both fascinating and deeply unsettling. On paper, it seems like a compassionate innovation—an attempt to preserve care, protection, and emotional continuity in a collapsing world. The film presents it as something born out of desperation and love rather than ambition, and that is what makes it morally complex instead of outright wrong.

However, the movie quietly questions whether emotions meant to grow through vulnerability can ever be engineered. A mother’s care is shaped by fatigue, fear, memory, and choice—things that cannot be fully coded. While the AI may learn patterns of affection, it lacks the lived body: the tired hands, the waiting, the silent sacrifices. Watching this as a mother myself, I felt that the film was suggesting that imitation of love is not the same as love itself.At the same time, the idea is not portrayed as evil. In a world drowning—literally and emotionally—the engine becomes a final act of hope. It holds memory when humans may not survive long enough to pass it on. In that sense, the film treats the AI not as a replacement for motherhood, but as an archive of it.

So, is it a good idea? The Great Flood seems to answer: necessary, but incomplete. The emotion engine can protect, remember, and respond—but it cannot truly replace the messy, imperfect, deeply human bond between a mother and a child. And perhaps that is the film’s quiet warning: technology may carry our love forward, but it should never be mistaken for the source of it.