The film The Fortress (2017) captures the choices and conflicts Joseon faced during the winter of the Manchu Invasion. Debates among rul...
We often find ourselves in confusion. When people draw opposite conclusions from the same event, it becomes hard to know what is true. If that argument decides a nation’s future, the confusion deepens.
The Fortress is set against the irrevocable history of King Injo’s Surrender at Samjeondo. It asks how we should look back on that winter and how we ought to accept it. The frozen walls, the snow-laden mountain fortress, and the characters’ silence and anguish pose difficult questions to the audience.
Film Details
Synopsis
In the winter of 1636, as the Manchu Invasion erupts, King Injo and the court retreat to the mountain fortress of Namhansanseong. Within those snow-beaten walls, two ministers clash over Joseon’s future. Choi Myeong-gil argues for a practical compromise to save lives, while Kim Sang-heon insists on holding the line of principle and continuing the fight. Between them, Injo wavers, unable to decide—until the fortress bears witness to a dynasty’s humiliation and the suffering of its people.
Viewing Highlights
Kim Sang-heon never lets go of principle. He believes Joseon’s face is the spirit of the nation, and that even if everything else collapses, the standard must stand. He declares that “to live uprightly is to die uprightly—that is truly living,” and so he urges resistance to the bitter end, convinced that this is the only righteous path.
And when he judges the national interest to be threatened, he even cuts down the old man who helped them cross the frozen river.
Choi Myeong-gil is coldly pragmatic. He faces the imbalance of power and admits they can no longer hold out. His words may sound like humiliation, but beneath them lies a desperate wish to make the people’s winter a little less harsh. He chooses survival over principle.
To live on, by any means, is—right now—the path to living rightly, he insists.
Injo hesitates between the two. Unable to shoulder the weight of the throne, he falters—an unadorned portrait of a leader’s powerlessness. When decisions are delayed, wounds spread first to those least able to bear them.
The film also carries another thread: the granddaughter of the old man unjustly killed in the name of principle, and the blacksmith who takes her in. Neither king nor minister, their story may never enter the records, yet it shows another form of dignity—one that keeps life going even in the shadow of defeat.
Personal Reflections
The grand debate changed the nation’s course, but the stories of the granddaughter and the blacksmith bring that debate close to our own lives. They remind us that behind the rhetoric of power, nameless lives are the first to be broken.
Kim Sang-heon held on to what’s right; Choi Myeong-gil thought first of the people; Injo wavered between them. The blacksmith, however, shows balance through action rather than words. To cling to what is right without ignoring others’ pain, and to face reality without blunting our own standards— that difficult balance is the question the film leaves with us.
The ending is a humiliation we already know, yet the film asks again about dignity after defeat. Even if defeat can’t be avoided, the meaning changes with the way we cross what comes after.
It’s a film that makes us consider how we look at life and history. It weighs heavy, it hurts, and yet it’s a work we ought to see.
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