Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds showed amazing success in South Korea. The movie itself is based from the webtoon, Along with the Gods, which was also a huge success in the webtoon community. Compared to the  illustration that reminds me of the  simplistic, rudimentary style of the comic strip Peanuts, the movie delivers high quality CGI for a Korean movie. Additionally selecting afterlife as a story is very fresh.

   The story is based on Korean Mythology, concentrated on the afterlife of Kim Ja-Hong, a firefighter that fell off a building saving a little girl. He goes on the journey with three people that guide him to the seven trials to judge whether he is guilty in his life. Although the movie is fiction, it makes the viewer reflect on how much sin we have in our life.

   At first when I heard the movie was coming, I knew how good the webtoon was. Plus the cast was good and the news that the movie is a high CGI fantasy movie made me look really forward to watching it.

    One part that was disappointing was that the lawyer of the webtoon strip didn’t come out in the movie. The lawyer in the comic had a huge effect on the overall story, and he was considered the main character as well as Kim Ja-Hong. I wondered how the movie will be produced without him. Some parts of the lawyer were fortunately taken on by Gangrim Doryeong, who lead the team.

   The CGi in this movie was outsourced to a Chinese company, and while some may think that It gave a spotlight to Chinese CGi technology, where Koreans thought Chinese CGi was low quality and bad, It put the  spotlight on Chinese CGi technology in a good way . Koreans worried that there would be no difference from “Low quality Chinese CGi movies”, but the movie was very natural, and more importantly, it was way cheaper than other CGi companies.

  Because of the movie’s success, the movie is very controversial, where some netizens say the movie destroyed the concept of the story and the comic, and was mainly made to fit the concept of a classical “Korean movie”. For example, the job of Kim Ja-Hong was actually a businessman in the webtoon, but it changed to a firefighter in the movie. It ended up removing all the scenes of the life of a businessman. Some viewers rebut that it was actually a better fit for the character to be portrayed as a firefighter than a normal businessman.

    Overall, the movie was a huge success in Korea. The movie production was a high risk to take, since they already recorded the sequel for the movie planned to release sometime this year. The overall profit of the movie ranked first place in the Korean movie markets. Now that the movie is   is such a big hit, people are spotlighting webtoon comics because of the movie’s success.