The contemporary Korean cinema has redefined how we understand genre. Good News, the latest, absurdist, tonally askew political satire from Byun Sung-hyun (Kill Boksoon) is part Dr. Strangelove, part The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (and those are just the films Sung-hyun directly references). From its very тιтle to its bizarre form, Good News is an ironic consideration of the ways state media controls the narratives the populace consumes, using its kitchen-sink approach to argue that the very meaning of “truth” has been dismantled by power.

Inspired by the very real plane hijacking of Japan Airlines Flight 351 in March 1970, Good News honors its historical beats but invents nearly everything else, which is part and parcel of Sung-hyun’s mission. Overstuffed and overlong, the film is nonetheless an effective, at times hilarious, cynical reflection of the general population’s inability to parse between propaganda and sincerity.

In Sung-hyun and co-writer Lee Jin-seong’s hands, the civilians in the hijacked plane become a collective political football between North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and the United States. To hammer this idea home, the film is told in a five-chapter structure, wherein the characters Nobody (Sul Kyung-gu) and Seo (Hong Kyung) infrequently break the fourth wall (they also seem to be able to hear each other’s inner monologue).

Nobody is a shadowy, good-natured, perpetually smoking, government fixer who refuses to disclose his idenтιтy, because he is, well… nobody. Or, at least, nobody anyone seems to have the authority to know. Nobody is called in to settle this budding international crisis, as the civilian aircraft has been hijacked by members of the Red Army Faction, a Japanese “violent extremist anti-government group” whose communist idealism is only equaled by their inepтιтude.

Their goal is to defeat “bourgeois capitalism,” insisting that an armed revolution is necessary to do so. Yet, it is clear they haven’t really thought through their plan enough to fly the plane into Pyongyang; no civilian aircraft is allowed over the demarcation zone, nor do they have the coordinates to do so.

The group calls itself Asнιтa no Joe, a reference to the 1968 manga of the same name, a Japanese boxing series that centers on a fighter who refuses to give up until the very end. And, indeed, the gang here is similarly stubborn. Smart enough to see through the South Korean government’s attempts to derail their plans, but not self-aware enough to know when to hang up the towel. Caught in the middle of the dispute between these many countries and their many, secretive intelligence arms is Seo, a smart but overly ambitious air traffic controller with dreams of fame and fortune.

Sung-hyun’s approach is borrowed heavily from Kubrick’s satire, especially in how it examines the vast gap between the powers that pull the levers and the lowly personnel that must bear the burden of those decisions, but the humor is never quite so seamless as its inspiration. Some jokes feel so shoe-horned in that they barely register, as when the flight captain (Kippei Shiina) casually mentions that he has aggressive hemorrhoids and his co-pilot (Kim Seung-o) suggests they are an honorable mark of his 10,000 hours in the sky, which should be shown off as a badge of honor.

When the humor does work, it is in service of Sung-hyun’s overall satirization of so-called military might. When the pilots successfully trick Denji (Show Kasamatsu), the Red Faction leader, that they have to land the plane at a small, provincial airport in Japan, the flight is momentarily sidelined by a ridiculous spider-web of international diplomacy. The Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) has one plan to keep the plane there: double-park it with a fighter jet. “Do you know how annoying it is to be double-parked when you’re in a hurry?“

Between the Korean CIA, the American CIA, the JSDF, the airline executives, Pyongyang, the Red Faction, and the civilians aboard, chaos explodes borne from secrets, state interests, and an overall inability to communicate. Nobody’s motivations are consistently murky and shifty, while Seo is persistently torn between his earnest desire to keep the hostages alive, a sense of patriotism to the South Korean government, and dreams of being recognized as a national hero.

Things come to a head for Seo when he is forced, essentially at gunpoint, to take over the air traffic control at a US airbase to pull off a “double” hijack by taking over the radio waves aboard the plane. Doing so works, and Seo is thrust into the role of governmental mouthpiece, directing the plane towards Kimpo International Airport (in South Korea) where the KCIA works, alongside a film director, to overhaul the look of the place to make it look like North Korea.

Convoluted though the plot is, its real function is to portray an environment of abject paranoia in which nothing is what it seems, and everyone is suspicious of what might come. As the characters on the screen play a game of tug-of-war to craft a national narrative about communism, capitalism, and whose motivations are pure, Sung-hyun tells a compelling story of how news media can be manipulated by anyone to tell a story about anything, so long as it fits the “interests” of the state.

Satirically, the film is sporadic yet forceful. At one point, the film becomes momentarily cartoonish, making fun of America’s simultaneous protestation that we are an innocent liberal democracy that also postures as the World’s Police (Sung-hyun also takes a stab at American diets in a scene where an American corporal inadvertently blows a plan because he cannot help from eating a hamburger). Less than a political position towards either the left or the right, Sung-hyun seems more concerned with how everyday people are used to fight the battles of those above us.

Ultimately, the film is successful in having its cake and eating it too. It is both a tense political thriller and a crackling satire of drunken power. The comedy of the first two-thirds becomes the horror in the last, as these people’s willful ignorance of danger becomes terrifying in its potential repercussions. The argument at its center is about media narratives. Do we believe a philosophical truth, or a “scientific” one? Or, what’s fake news and what is true, to use a modern parlance. If the government decides what is true and what isn’t, is truth actually real? Or is it just a story? “Sometimes even the truth lies,” Seo muses in voiceover, “and lies also tell the truth.“