Too clumsy. I have a special relationship with Asian cinema. Korean cinema is foreign to me. Largely because everything in it is exaggerated. And if their Japanese colleagues in the Asian shop are capable, even if not always, but at least sometimes capable of allegory, subtle hints, metaphors, and if it turns out to be clumsy, then it is built into an absolute grotesque.
It's different with the Koreans. They like realism. Drawing their life with rough strokes, they often deprive their film works of elegance. The same thing happened with the Excavator. The story is about a veteran of the Korean War. And if he's a veteran, he's supposed to catch flashbacks from the war. From the first minute of the film, we are told what to do. A Korean with Afghan syndrome begins to recall the war, dig up photos from those times, and visit his colleagues.
And that's where the stamp conveyor starts. Heroes behave like typical Hollywood dummy, do everything that according to all canons and should do people with post-war syndrome. And then I remember Ozon's semi-documentary film, By God's Will, which tells the story of the victims of a pedophile. The main characters fight in seizures, catching flashbacks from childhood. The same goes for the Excavator.
The analogy with the film Ozone, apparently, came to me not by chance. I felt that the behavior of the heroes was irrelevant to the behavior of people who had gone through the war. They are too weepy, emotional, impressionable. It may be that way in Korean culture, but in our culture. Different. Take at least Danila Bagrov from the movie "Brother", a man went through the war, and what? He became a different, brutal murder weapon, not a smear like this one from The Excavator. I want to say that war is certainly traumatic, but also tempering. And it is difficult for me to imagine a veteran of any war who, as in this film, remembering the past, tips over a bottle of beer, breaks it against stones and theatrically tries to open his veins with a rose from a bottle.
Verdict: The film is clumsy, trying, Hollywood-style, to squeeze a tear out of you, consisting of a pile of stamps. You can watch only for the sake of studying Korean culture and life there, although for these purposes there are samples much better.