Netflix's 'The Great Flood' Is, Uh, Not What It Appears To Be

Over on Netflix this week, the South Korean disaster film The Great Flood has briefly claimed the top spot from Rian Johnson’s brilliant third Knives Out installment, Wake Up Dead Man. Co-written and directed by Kim Byung-woo (The Terror Live), The Great Flood initially presents itself as a fairly standard disaster movie. And for a while, that’s exactly what it is. Until it isn’t.

In the opening moments, scientist Gu An-na (Kim Da-mi) is trapped in a high-rise apartment with her young son, Ja-in (Kwon Eun-sung). It seems like a normal morning, save for the torrential rain, until a massive tsunami slams into their building. They soon learn from Son Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo) - a mysterious man sent to rescue them - that an asteroid has struck Antarctica, melting the ice sheets and setting humanity on an irreversible course toward total submersion. A helicopter awaits. Time is running out.

The film’s first half follows An-na, Ja-in, and Hee-jo as they attempt to navigate the collapsing high-rise, contending with blocked stairwells, gas explosions, and other residents trapped in their own escalating emergencies. Along the way, we’re filled in on An-na’s backstory: her husband died in a submerged car accident; she works on an AI Emotion Engine; and she is the last living scientist capable of continuing the project, which aims to replicate humanity through artificial beings capable of human emotions. An-na, naturally, is responsible for the emotions.

This is where the twist arrives, and once it does, the rest of the movie snaps into focus. Suffice it to say, it owes more to Edge of Tomorrow than The Day After Tomorrow. The idea is mildly intriguing, but also faintly irritating, largely because everything that follows feels foreordained to anyone even moderately familiar with the genre.

That said, it’s not a bad movie. It’s just not a particularly good one, either. It’s a Netflix movie—emphatically not one of the exceptions (like Wake Up Dead Man or Train Dreams). It’s a film about artificial intelligence that often feels as though it were engineered by artificial intelligence, calibrated to satisfy a Netflix algorithm chasing a Netflix demographic identified by artificial intelligence. As a holiday time-waster, it’s perfectly serviceable. Just keep your expectations firmly in check.