This South Korean film is a fictionalised view into the experiences of german reporter Jürgen Hinzpeter (who died in 2016) and driver Kim Sa-bok (unkown to the public) at the Gwangju uprising in 1980. The filmmakers tried to identify Kim Sa-bok prior to the production, but only after the films release it has surfaced that the man had died of cancer in 1984, four years after the events in the film. Knowing nearly nothing about the driver, the filmmaker tried their best to create an intruiging character, that fit the movie. The actor Song Kang-ho as well as his german counterpart Thomas Kretschmann both did great jobs and I liked their performances.
The screenplay/plot is not too bad, it does a good job being both entertaining and sometimes even light-hearted, as well as handling the though and serious topic of the gwangju uprising very well. However the pacing of the movie isn't absolutely great, with the rythm of the film sometimes a bit off, so it could have also been a little shorter than 135 min. Another problem was, that although I know about the history, for me personally this tragedy hasn't been translated well enough onto the movie. Objectively they handeled the tragedy well, but I was left a little bit cold. That being said I did enjoy the film and would rate it 7.5 if i could.