By John Ruberry
A little over a week ago Black Knight, a six-episode dystopian series set in Korea, began streaming on Netflix.
It’s 2071, decades earlier a comet struck Earth. The Korean peninsula is now a dunes-covered desert, only one percent of the population survived the disaster. Earth’s atmosphere is poisonous. Most of landmass of Earth is underwater,
The government is a corporatist dictatorship. The corporation is the Cheonmyeong Group, led by Chairman Ryu (Nam Kyung-eub), but run by his evil son, Ryu Seok (Song Seung-heon). The Republic of Korea–presumably North Korea and the Kim family didn’t survive the blast–is led by a president (Jin Kyung), but Ryu Seok is really in charge. He’s a Rahm Emanuel-style “Never let a crisis go to waste” type.
That tiny population is divided into four groups, castes really, and the top group is the Core, which consists of the Cheonmyeong Group and the top tier of the government, and a couple of middle classes, General and Special. But the majority of the survivors are classified as refugees, who for the most part scrape out a miserable survival in the ruins of the former city of Seoul.
The Core of course enjoy a luxurious existence.
All but the refugees have coveted QR codes tattooed on a hand that allows them entrance into restricted areas–and to purchase desperately needed supplies, especially oxygen.
Is there a way out from the misery for the refugees? Yes, the legit path is to become a deliveryman, a truck driver for the Cheonmyeong Group, transporting those vital supplies. Think of Mad Max in The Road Warrior driving a semitrailer as the wheeled army of Humongous follows him around the Wasteland, only for a post-apocalypse Korean Amazon. The greatest of these deliverymen is 5-8 (Kim Woo-bin). In the post-apocalyptic Korea, deliveryman eschew their birthnames in exchange for the numbered district they service. By the way, there are some female deliverymen.
The other way for the refugees to escape their bleak lives is the criminal path–becoming Hunters. Once again, think of the mobile gangs of the Mad Max franchise. These Black Nights fire back–and 5-8 even electrocutes a pair of them who make the mistake of climbing onto his truck.
Yoon Sa-wol (Kang You-seok) is a mischievous refugee teen who idolizes 5-8–he even plays a 5-8 computer game–and he and dreams of becoming a deliveryman. Sa-wol is illegally living with two sisters, one of them is Major Jung Seol (Esom). The sisters, I believe, are classified as Special, one notch down from Core.
Sa-wol is an orphan–so yes, he’s yet another “chosen one,” along the lines of Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, and Frodo Baggins.
Predictably, the paths of 5-8, Seol, and Sa-wol cross. 5-8 has learned that he has much more to offer Korea than being a deliveryman, even one who is already a folk hero.
Black Knight is an enjoyable Netflix diversion. There is of course an abundance of action but also some subtle humor. For instance, 5-8, despite breathing poisoned air, still smokes cigarettes.
More direct humor is offered by Sa-wol’s pals, with the unusual names of Dummy (Jung Eun-seong), Dumb-Dumb (Lee Sang-jin), and Useless (Lee Joo-seung), who live with a clever mechanic and inventor, Grandpa (Kim Eui-sung).
But if you are looking for a romantic storyline, look elsewhere. There are no love stories in Black Knight.
If you are a connoisseur of compelling cinematography and sharp CGI, then you’ll love Black Knight.
And if you drive a delivery truck for UPS, a grocer, and especially Amazon, then let your imagination run wild and dream away as you watch, and presumably love, this series.
Black Knight is rated TV-MA by Netflix for violence and smoking. It is available for viewing in Korean with subtitles, in English, and several other languages. I watched it in Korean.
John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.
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