Even at a blisteringly paced 160 minutes, Hope feels like it needs to be twice as long to fit all of writer/director Na Hong-jin’s ambitions. The characters and audience are in go mode from the first to the last minute, chasing and running through the titular town as it comes under attack from something not of this planet. Na presents it all with thrilling precision, a modern master of genre filmmaking behind 2008’s The Chaser and 2016’s The Wailing. Ten years have passed from the latter film to this one, reportedly every second of that gap dedicated to delivering what should be the biggest action spectacle to explode across the silver screen since Mad Max: Fury Road.

And yet, for all its propulsiveness, Hope only has enough gas in the tank to drive about halfway to its destination. For much of its runtime, the smell of burnt fumes permeates the air, with Na relying on everything in his toolbox to convince us of the larger-than-life scope he so desperately wants to achieve. Maybe it’s the way this monster movie takes way too long to show its cards, only to reveal quite the bluff, or that its characters are mostly just screaming cartoons, but I can’t help but feel both refreshingly exhilarated and disappointingly exhausted.

Except for sight, Na engages all of our senses as he sets the stage for the chaos. A rotting cow carcass is found just outside of town, with claw marks on its stomach too big to be from any natural predator, and the smell of rotting fish stinking up the immediate area. There’s also a sticky goo that’s been left behind, the taste sending everyone flinching back. Police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) takes charge of this case, sending some local hunters up into the woods to look for more clues as he goes back into town to get some reinforcements.

But before he can even drive the few miles back to the station, explosions and gunfire scream out. Also engulfing the air is a menacing roar that leads Bum-seok down the streets of Hope, each subsequent one ripped apart with superhuman savagery. Production designer Lee Hwo-kyoung built much of the town from scratch, the hand-crafted apocalypse offering a real sense of death and destruction. For quite a while, it’s all Na gives us: clues to envision what kind of horrible creature could have done this.

An hour later, the culprit is finally revealed… and he looks hideous. He has long hair, orange, greasy skin, stands about ten feet tall, and has razor-sharp teeth stained with the blood of the townspeople. He also looks rendered for a PlayStation 2 video game, with enhanced speed made possible by moving the frame at twice the speed. It’s distractingly silly, with the reported $30 million budget, the biggest in South Korean history, not being nearly enough to accommodate how much screen time this creature gets throughout the next 90 minutes.

And once that embarrassing initial reveal occurs, there’s no true way to suspend our disbelief anymore. For all the bullets, bombs, and booming score from Michael Abels, I could not bring myself to think of these monsters as an interesting threat. Nor could I ever fully grab onto Na’s wavelength of mixing humor and horror, each moment teetering me into the direction of laughing at the movie rather than with it. Somehow, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell are involved here, although you’d be hard-pressed to figure out the reasoning for their casting, or why Na teases us with a promise of more information about their characters in later chapters.

Then again, more information, even as un-tantalizing as it sounds, would be better than the nothingburger here. I’m a sucker for camera movement, highly intrusive scores, and gonzo kinetic action. Hope has more of that than any other film this year, and I’m glad to see it getting as big a rollout as Neon is providing it here in the United States. At least Na has the fiscal responsibility not to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on mindless action. Now let’s hope he keeps up that sensibility by not wasting any more money on future chapters.

Neon will release Hope in theaters nationwide on September 09th.