This wartime epic from writer-director Je-gyu Kang clearly hungers to be seen as the South Korean Saving Private Ryan, and in many respects it succeeds in this endeavour. A tale of two very different brothers who are reluctantly inducted into the army after Kim Il Sung's divisions invade their homeland in 1950, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (the first part of the title refers to the South Korean flag) contains some of the most convincing combat footage ever lensed by a non ­documentary filmmaker. Once the boys get to the front, the action is pretty much nonstop, and no one looking for a good bloodletting is likely to be disappointed.

What's more, the production design is extraordinarily elaborate, a luxury that makes this film seem more Hollywood than Korean new wave, a fact that probably had something to do with its extraordinary success at the Asian box office.

That said, Tae Guk Gi is a pretty peculiar film, at least for non-Koreans.

History students, for instance, will be amazed at how many details such a heavily researched feature gets wrong (dates, hairstyles, aircraft). If one didn't know any better, one would assume from this movie that the North Koreans were thrown back across the border with little outside help (even the American presence is limited almost entirely to the occasional overhead bomber).

As if that weren't bad enough, some of the northern battles unfold as if they were actually taking place in the south. This sometimes makes it difficult to figure who's doing what to whom and why.

If anything, the microcosmic drama is as perplexing as its macrocosmic counterpart. Older brother Jin-tae Lee's (Dong-Kun Jang) transformation from happy-go-lucky cobbler into merciless superwarrior is startlingly abrupt, while younger brother Jin-seok Lee's (Bin Won) reluctance to accept his stronger sibling's help seems alternately churlish and demented.

As for the brothers' powers of recuperation, one doubts that a bull elephant, in the pink of health, could recover from the wounds that they repeatedly receive.

Even these anomalies, however, pale to insignificance when set beside the film's dizzying swings between unabashed savagery and oleaginous sentimentality. For western viewers, the switch is akin to leaping from Mary Poppins into Band of Brothers without being given the chance to catch one's breath.

On the other hand, there's no denying Tae Guk Gi's genuine antiwar credentials or its determination to be fair to both sides: if the North Koreans have a nasty propensity for shooting civilians, their southern cousins think nothing of burning Communist captives alive.

Whatever else it might be, this is no John Wayne ­style flag waver (although its U.S. release could have something to do with North Korea's perceived membership in George W.'s "axis of evil").

On balance, Tae Guk Gi is a pretty good movie. But don't forget: it's also fairly weird.