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[HanCinema's Film Review] "The Map Against the World"

The time is the nineteenth century. Jeong-ho (played by Cha Seung-won) is obsessed with the abstract concept of maps. This is a very necessary personality attribute considering the time in which he lived. Back before satellites the only way to make a halfway decent map was by traveling in person to whatever physical location you want to make a map of and taking detailed notes. Even in a small country like Korea, this is a very time-consuming task. Lucky thing there's so much beautiful scenery to keep the task engaging.

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Note that relatively little screentime is spent on exploring. "The Map Against the World" makes the wise decision to instead focus on the less exciting but substantially more intriguing questions of how and why the maps are made. The how is simple enough- it involves the construction of a large numbers of prints, properly backing them up, and then copying them. Jeong-ho's exceptional skills when it comes to map making are why his craftsmanship is well remembered by peers even as Jeong-ho himself is rumored to have died somewhere. Which is reasonable, considering there were still tigers around back then.

The why, well, that's a more complicated question. "The Map Against the World" takes place in the late Joseon period, where government officials were exceptionally paranoid. While Jeong-ho is merely obsessed with map-making, ultimately, the value his maps potentially pose to foreign powers is such that his fate is frequently a battle of wills between people far more politically powerful than any mere cartographer.

Compared to the real-life Jeong-ho, the fictional version deals with setbacks that are no doubt exaggerated for dramatic license. But all of this serves to prove a point, Jeong-ho's mistreatment by Joseon officials, and the stark contrast with Jeong-ho's technical expertise in mapmaking, are symbolic of how a political regime in decline will simply strike out at any assumed enemies rather than consider solutions that don't involve murder and torture.

It's a pretty effective message that's surprisingly easy to apply to the present day, which is of course part of the point. While on one end it's interesting to learn about the guy who created the first complete map of the Korean peninsula, on the flip side Jeong-ho was not just a random genius. His passion to cartography, while exceptional, was limited by the context of the world he lived in. Observe what happens when some intelligent Japanese people get a hold of Jeong-ho's maps, and how their Korean equivalents respond.

In this way "The Map Against the World" presents a very negative view toward the Joseon government while showing stark admiration to the Joseon people, like Jeong-ho, who simply focused on their own narrow interests without regard to political considerations. Jeong-ho's great map of Korea was ultimately completed, but only individual pieces survive to this day in museums. That Joseon itself suffered the same fate is, far from being ironic, really the only logical end point.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Map Against the World" is directed by Kang Woo-suk and features Cha Seung-won, Yu Jun-sang, Kim In-kwon and Nam Ji-hyun,

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