The South Korean Joint Security Area is a fast paced thriller with lots of surprises - though at times it's difficult to follow

 Park Chan-wook's highly successful South Korean film Joint Security Area (2000), based on a novel (not on "true events"), is at first a challenge for American viewers who may not be familiar w/ some of the protocols and procedures regarding the military standoff at the DMZ between the 2 Koreas - in fact, it may help to story the film (on the great Criterion Channel) about 30 minutes in and rewatch those to make sure you have the principals and principles clear in your mind. From that point on, the movie is dramatic and exciting - centering on an investigation by neutral nations (in particular, one of the investigators is a Geneva-born Swiss army Major of Korean descent) of a fatal shooting - execution style? - in the North Korean border outpost. There are numerous twists and surprises in the plot, and if you can't quite get them all clear in your mind just enjoy the movie for the drama and the interactions among some extremely different types of the military personnel, from hard-line extremists on both sides of the line to everyday soldiers filling out the terms of their required military service. Some of the characters who seem heroic at the outset turn out to be everything but - as the film continues to surprise us and disrupt our expectations at many turns