Like many of cinema’s best historical black comedies, Good News is based on fact. The Korean film follows the real-life 1970 hijacking of a Japanese aircraft by young members of a militant political organization called Red Army Faction. But viewers looking for a straightforward thriller chronicling the international incident will not find it here. Director and co-writer Byun Sung-hyun signals his satirical interests early, skipping an intense look at the start of the attack and focusing on an earplug-donning passenger who sleeps through the initial proclamation. Air Force One, this very intentionally is not.
“All the films that deal with an event like this one, there’s just so much detailed process of the hijacking part,” Byun tells TIME at the Busan International Film Festival, where Good News had its Asian premiere in September. “They all try to depict the tension in every detail. And I felt like we’ve seen too much of that already. I remember when I was writing the actual hijacking sequence, it almost felt like I was writing somebody else’s film. So that’s when I got to thinking, what if we just omit the process and then start from after that?”
The earplug scene is only one example of Good News deftly undercutting moments usually played for extreme drama in service of the film’s true focus: the harried, usually spineless middle management responses from multiple nations’ governments and agencies. This is where Good News takes the most historical liberties, fleshing out fictional characters and giving them agency in a story that is as much about the terrifying absurdities of the present political moment as it is about a decades-old plane hijacking.
“When I was writing the script and when we were shooting the film, I was quite exhausted, if not, felt a sense of almost hatred toward what I would constantly hear from the news,” says Byun. “I wanted to tell a story that wasn’t as straightforward or direct, and I wanted to create a character to tell that story.”
“Even the truth lies. And lies also tell the truth,” says Mr. Nobody (Hyper Knife’s Sul Kyung Gu), an enigmatic figure who works as a behind-the-scenes fixer for the South Korean government in Good News’ fictionalized retelling of events. In the moment that summarizes one of Good News’ thematic throughlines, Nobody is speaking to Seo Go-myung (Weak Hero Class 1’s Hong Kyung), an ambitious Air Force lieutenant who is as close to an audience surrogate as Good News gets.
Like the viewer, Go-myung spends much of Good News’ raucous runtime in disbelief at the cowardly apathy of mid-ranking officials from the Japanese, South Korean, and United States governments, militaries, and intelligence agencies as they attempt to hot potato responsibility for the potential international humiliation to someone else. Go-myung’s conversations with Nobody, who pretends self-interested nonchalance but prioritizes human life in a way the bureaucrats he manipulates largely do not, are the film at its most earnest.
The inspiration behind Good News
Even before Byun had a subject, he had a genre. Inspired by recent black comedies like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, Byun decided to take a stab at a darkly comedic, politically minded film following the success of action thriller Kill Boksoon.
“Not only in Korea, but everywhere around the world, for just regular people like me, when you see how politics is unfolding, there’s so many absurd events that are taking place,” Byun tells TIME. “Something that I felt as I was creating this black comedy film is that, no matter how creative you get, you just can’t beat reality.
Byun learned about the 1970 hijacking a few years ago, after watching a TV show about the incident. “I remember watching it and thinking: that’s absurd, and I bet there’s going to be a film about that story,” he recounts. “Then years passed, and no film was made. So I thought that story itself could be a black comedy film.”
He started with research, digging into the news articles and interviews from the time and using the real-life events as a framework for a modern story. “I was actually more curious about what happened after that event took place,” he says.
Good News Courtesy of Netflix
The real story behind the movie
What did happen on Japanese Airline Flight 351? Actually, Good News keeps the broad details of the hijacking accurate. As we see in the film, the domestic flight was taken over shortly following take-off from Tokyo. While the film changes the specific identities of the hijackers, they really were a small band of militant Communists. The youngest was a teenager. The group found inspiration from the boxing manga series Ashita no Joe.
What did the hijackers want? The Red Army Faction advocated for an immediate, armed revolution against the capitalist class in Japan. From there, they would use their base in Japan to work towards bringing down the United States and its allies. Following increased police attention in Japan, the group began to search for another home for their guerilla training and revolution planning.
The original plan was to fly the plane to Cuba where they could continue to organize and train, but the Boeing 727 was not equipped for such a long flight. The hijackers revised their destination to a different Communist country: North Korea. They stopped in Fukuoka, and were allowed to refuel in exchange for the release of 23 passengers (women, children, and the elderly). There, the pilots really were given a map of the Korean peninsula torn out of a middle school textbook.
With only the map to go on and no idea how to contact the airport in Pyongyang, the pilots headed toward the no-fly zone between North and South Koreas. Directed by a voice on the radio claiming to be Pyongyang, they landed in what they thought was the North Korean capital. However, it was actually Seoul’s Gimpo Airport where an elaborate ruse had been staged. South Korean flags were replaced with North Korean ones. Actors were brought in to pretend to be North Korean soldiers and wellwishers, and a choir of local schoolchildren sang traditional songs.
Despite the effort, the hijackers realized that they had been tricked. Similar to what happens in the movie, Japan’s Deputy Minister Shinjiro Yamamura volunteered to take the place of the remaining hostages, and the hijackers agreed. The hijackers successfully flew to Pyongyang, where they were offered asylum. Two days later, the plane, the minister, and the pilots returned safely to Haneda Airport in Tokyo.
Notably, Good News changes the names of everyone involved in the real-life incident, including the political figures, hijackers, and pilots, highlighting how the film is not history, but rather a fictionalized version of real-life events.
Show Kasamatsu as Denji Song Kyoung-sub/Netflix
The ending of Good News, explained
Heading into the film’s climax, the plane is parked at Seoul’s Gimpo Airport. Denji (Kasamatsu Show), the lead revolutionary, has stabbed himself and given the local authorities a deadline: if they aren’t allowed to leave before he bleeds out—or the clock hits noon, whichever comes first—they will detonate the bomb on board, killing everyone.
The Korean first lady—played by Kill Boksoon star Jeon Do-yeon—arrives on the scene to declare her husband has granted the hijackers permission to take off if they release the hostages. However, when Go-myung radios the hijackers to let them know of the agreement, they refuse to believe him or the capitalist governments he represents. After all, it was Go-myung who had pretended to be Pyongyang on the radio, luring the plane to Seoul.
When the situation starts to look futile, the politicians begin fleeing the airport like rats on a sinking ship, not wanting to be the one left holding the bag. In the film’s version of events, the fate of the plane and everyone on it comes down to Nobody’s ability to manipulate the relative sincerity of Japan’s Deputy Minister Shinichi Ishida and Seo Go-myung.
A desperate Go-myung, disgusted by the lack of effort by the politicians, makes a run for the plane. He plans to use every last second before the bomb explodes to try to convince the hijackers to release the hostages and to fly to Pyongyang. He literally slips and falls before he can make it, but the act of courage convinces Ishida to offer himself as a trade.
As far as plane hijacking stories go, Good News has a pretty happy ending. No one dies. The hijackers get to go to North Korea. The Japanese Deputy Minister is welcomed home as a hero. And Mr. Nobody, allegedly a North Korean defector who has been living at the shadowy whims of the national intelligence agency, gets a South Korean resident card.
But Go-myung remains disappointed. In order to keep the U.S. happy, South Korea is removing themselves from the narrative. (Rising tensions on the Korean peninsula would be bad for the U.S. and Soviet Union’s renewed talks.) According to the official record, they had no role in keeping the people on Japan Airline Flight 351 alive, Mr. Nobody tells Go-myung. This means no glory and no promotion for Go-myung, who risked so much of himself to help save the day. This means the public will only get a partial truth.
Mr. Nobody tries to console him with his own personal philosophy. Earlier in the film, he shared a quote attributed to someone named Truman Shady: “Sometimes the truth lies on the far side of the moon. But that doesn’t mean what’s on the near side is fiction.” Of course, there is no Truman Shady. Those are Mr. Nobody’s own words. By ascribing them to someone else, he gets none of the credit for their wisdom, but that doesn’t mean they are not his words.
“It’s still the moon,” Mr. Nobody tells Go-myung. “It doesn’t need a name in order to exist. It also doesn’t need to be recognized to hold meaning on its own. What you did, in itself, was worthwhile.” Nobody gives Go-myung a watch like the one his father had been awarded after losing his legs in the Vietnam War. The watch’s face casts a moon-like light on Go-myung’s face. Go-myung may not have his name in the history books, but he helped save the people on that plane. In the world of the film, that is true.
Whether or not Go-myung believes Mr. Nobody to be sincere in this conversation or not, the film implies that he is. When Mr. Nobody is awarded his residency card, he must choose a name. He opts for Choi Go-myung, implying he was deeply moved by Seo Go-myung’s actions.
Whatever else viewers take away from the film, Byun hopes they will ask themselves a question. “I don’t want to make films thinking or wanting a particular response from the audience,” he says. “But one hope that I do have is that I wish, after people watch the film, it just won’t completely evaporate. I hope that at least on the day of watching the film, or maybe the next day, you will think at least once about what the movie was trying to say.”
