Rewriting the Korean war: Re-monumental and counter-monumental cinema

This article offers a comparative examination of The Battle at Lake Changjin (China) and Taegukgi: Brotherhood of War (South Korea), two landmark blockbusters that exemplify a post-Cold War trend to reframe the Korean War for present national agendas, but pull in opposite aesthetic and ethical directions. Drawing on monumentality studies, this article argues that Lake Changjin re-monumentalizes Chinese war memory by revising China’s war justification and reconstructing a heroic national narrative, whereas Taegukgi operates as a counter-monumental intervention that contests the war’s ethical warrant and shifts attention from state purpose to personal trauma and human cost. These divergent commemorative strategies depart decisively from earlier Korean War films in their respective national traditions and establish distinct benchmarks for contemporary war filmmaking at home. Despite their differences, both productions are similarly conditioned by their respective sociopolitical contexts: Xi-era China’s promotion of state nationalism and Sunshine Policy-era South Korea’s embrace of ethnic nationalism. Combining historical inquiry with cinematic analysis, this study demonstrates how war cinema functions as a form of modern monumentality that, capable of rebuilding a nation’s pantheon or dismantling it, actively reshapes collective memory and political consciousness while remapping the moral-affective terrain upon which national identities are forged, contested, and renewed.