Movie Review: The Great Flood

I went into The Great Flood thinking this was going to be a straightforward disaster movie — you know, rising water, collapsing buildings, humanity paying the price for its own mistakes. And honestly? I would’ve been perfectly fine with that. Sometimes a disaster movie should just be a disaster movie. No overthinking, no philosophy class, just nature reclaiming what humans ruined. Call me simple, but that’s the joy of the genre.

Instead, The Great Flood decided to be… a lot.

Yes, the setup is intense. A flooded high-rise, a grieving mother, a child to save, and the world literally ending. Visually, the film is stunning. The flooding sequences are terrifying in a quiet, suffocating way, and the sense of scale really works. Kim Da-mi carries the emotional weight convincingly, and Park Hae-soo brings his usual grounded presence. From a technical standpoint, this movie is solid — even impressive.

But then comes the twist. And the twist after that. And the twist about the twist.

What starts as a survival story quickly spirals into AI ethics, consciousness transfer, simulated timelines, emotional data harvesting, and humanity’s obsession with cheating extinction. By the time the film reveals that most of what we’re watching are simulations designed to perfect artificial emotional responses, I found myself more exhausted than moved. Instead of feeling the urgency of survival, I was busy trying to figure out what was real, what wasn’t, and whether the flood even mattered anymore.

And that’s where the movie lost me.

I wanted to feel dread, tension, maybe even a bit of dark satisfaction watching humans face consequences. Instead, I got an existential loop of suffering dressed up as emotional science. It’s clever, sure. It’s fresh, definitely. But for me, it stripped away the raw thrill that makes disaster movies fun in the first place. The emotional manipulation felt intentional rather than organic, and by the end, I felt more disconnected than devastated.

That said, I can see why others might love this. It’s ambitious, visually striking, and conceptually bold. It just wasn’t the kind of disaster movie I was hoping for. Sometimes depth enhances a story — sometimes it buries it underwater.

I’m giving The Great Flood a 4/10. Points for visuals and performances, but the story was simply too heavy and overcomplicated for my liking.