Haeundae starts rather weak. The first 1/3 of the movie you meet many annoying characters, while others seem to be rather slow-witted. But you get used to it after half of the movie. Then you have learned about everyone's backstory and the disaster movie unfolds.From there on things pick up pace. The special effects are good, though I think I've seen better ones. It's due to the first half of the movie, which was at times a bit difficult to bear, that you actually care about what happens to the people now. There are many plot twists and the movie surprises you every time you think you know what will happen next. Being unpredictable is its strong point.This might be the first time I actually wrote a review without spoilers ^^. I really enjoyed it and wouldn't it be for some unfair plot parts and very bitchy people, it would have scored even higher. Still it's 8 out of 10 for me.If you want a disaster movie with a good plot, that's your choice.

Doesn't work like "The Tower" did. That too was a Korean Disaster Movie. Here, there is 1 hour, 10 minutes of set up. The character stories are okay, I guess, but I found them uninvolving.The tidal wave follows, which is fairly impressive for a lower-budget movie such as this. After that, there is some suspenseful rescue footage. And, there is a very funny and well-staged sequence of one guy on a bridge who finds himself dodging some very dangerous stuff!The movie is okay, but these Korean Disaster Movies don't seem to get the delicate balance of disaster and melodrama that made the genre great in the first place.**** (4 Out of 10 Stars)

Tidal Wave (2009)** (out of 4) This South Korean disaster picture deals with a wide range of people who at first are trying to deal with their personal lives but this all changes when a tsunami hits and they must fight for their lives. Apparently this film had the biggest budget for anything to come from South Korean and in fact I thought the special effects of the disaster looked pretty good but more on that in a bit. What really kills TIDAL WAVE is the first eighty-minutes, which is the time spent with the characters. It's clear that this film is just like so many American films in that we spend the majority of the running time getting to know the characters so that when the disaster does hit we care for them and want to see them survive. The problem here is that the majority of this is built around a bunch of comedy bits that simply aren't funny and in fact they really take you out of the movie. I'm really not sure what the purpose of these comedy scenes were but they should have been in a Laurel and Hardy movie and not something like this. Even the personal drama was pretty predictable as we are given the same stereotypes and same clichés that every disaster movie has followed since the 1970s. The film certainly does come alive once the tsunami hits and I thought the special effects were extremely good on the whole. Yes, there are some shots that are obviously fake but I enjoyed the imagination that went into them and we do get some pretty intense scenes. Still, after these scenes we fall back into the cliché routine with way too many scenes where someone is giving their live for someone else's and it just gets a bit repetitive after a while. TIDAL WAVE, on the whole, is a disappointment but fans of the genre will still want to check out the actual disaster bit.

...but my gosh, it works. This is quite literally one of the best disaster movies I've ever watched, and I've seen most American-made ones of the last 45 years. For once, a movie actually had characters and development I genuinely cared about, which made it all the more somber once the wave actually impacted. A lot of people complained about the build-up, the character development, which takes up probably 90% of the film. Honestly, I loved it. I felt I was watching a romantic comedy at times (until drama slipped in, but still), and it worked beautifully. I've come to the conclusion you can't approach this movie from the "disaster movie" angle, you have to approach it from the "drama surrounding a disaster" kind of movie. It's about the lives and relations of the people on the coast who are going to be effected by this, not necessarily pawns just to be written off by the story later. If you're looking purely for a disaster film with little plot and emotion, don't go for this.... watch The Day After Tomorrow or Earthquake or 2012, but if you want your disaster mixed in with an emotional story about a tight-knit community on the coast with a storm looming in on them, then this is your film. Highly, highly recommended.