Rating: 3.75/5 
The indebtedness to Robert Altman’s dark comedy reveals itself from the start, as a brief flashback at the start of the war shows North Korean troops capturing and releasing Kang Eun-pyo (Shin Ha-kyun) and his comrades. The enemy officer explains to them that the war will be over in a week anyway. Three years later, Kang is on hand to witness the latest breakdown in negotiations when the parties from both sides cannot even figure out which army holds what meaningless hill in order to draw possible borders. Kang soon finds himself transferred to one of those contested battlegrounds, Aerok Hill, to investigate the possibility of a Communist mole within the ranks.
The camp in question contains its fair share of war movie stereotypes, from the quivering, virginal private to the resourceful master sergeant. Combined with the film’s washed-out look, these standard-issue soldier models practically beg comparisons to Spielberg’s WWII yarn. But Jang Hun soon adds dark, off-kilter touches that spice up the overdone tedium of the genre. Kang and the new C.O. of the company arrive to find a camp in total disarray. Orphaned, maimed children scamper about and men wear enemy uniforms to stay warm in the bitter winter. When Kang finds the acting commander, the officer’s morphine-littered tent is so bleached with light it resembles less the dimmed faux-newsreel of Saving Private Ryan than the world outside the Zone in Stalker.
There’s also the matter of the hill itself. The area’s constant changing of hands has taken its toll: incessant artillery and air bombardment has reduced the vegetation of the mountain to charcoal, and so many bodies have been buried that, in one scene, Kang inadvertently digs up one corpse as he’s making a grave for another. Jang also lets the audience in on the secret regarding the supposed “mole” quickly: by virtue of each side constantly moving back into the bunker in the hill, whoever controls Aerok when the other army attacks leaves behind presents and messages.
This act stresses something audiences outside Korea might forget, that the conflict was a civil war that just so happened to be exacerbated by international intervention. The fact that so many on either side of the 38th Parallel divide are related to people in the other half of the peninsula tempers many soldiers’ hatred for the enemy, and weariness of the chain of command that continues to send waves of people to die for this useless rock unites them in ways that would lead to peace far quicker than aloof, cynical diplomacy. Kang went to Aerok partly to check whether the former C.O. was killed by his own men, but does the answer to that question even matter if, technically, the entire war is about killing one’s own?
Jang tightly frames the gore of battle, but he knows how to pull back just far enough to give the carnage a cold objectivity that makes the senselessly perpetuated horrors of the war more deeply felt. The Front Line too often pauses to get across some awkwardly political piece of dialogue, but it speaks loudest when it simply shows soldiers so worn down that they begin to fight mechanically. Even when ripped apart by explosions, soldiers continue to lethargically aim and shoot, not out of conviction to the cause but from sheer rote. You can see the seeds for an enduringly uneasy ceasefire born here in the faces of men who want nothing more than to stop fighting but are now locked into an almost biological function that compels their service unto death. Set against that muted horror, the occasional, brutal defying of orders seems less shocking than just.
