2012 South Korean Film The Tower

The film is directed by Kim Ji-hoon, and stars Sol Kyung-gu, Son Ye-jin and Kim Sang-kyung in the lead roles. It was released in theaters on December 25, 2012.

The Tower
Theatrical release poster
Korean name
Hangul	타워
Revised Romanization	Tawo
McCune–Reischauer	T'awŏ
Directed by	Kim Ji-hoon
Written by	Kim Sang-don Heo Jun-seok Adaptation Kim Ji-hoon Yoo Young-ah Lee Min-jae
Produced by	Lee Han-seung Lee Su-man
Starring	Sol Kyung-gu Kim Sang-kyung Son Ye-jin
Cinematography	Kim Young-ho
Edited by	Kim Sang-bum Kim Jae-bum
Music by	Kim Tae-seong
Production company	The Tower Pictures
Distributed by	CJ Entertainment
Release date	December 25, 2012 (2012-12-25)
Running time	121 minutes
Country	South Korea
Language	Korean
Budget	US$9.3 million
Box office	US$36.4 million

Lee Dae-ho is a single father and manager of Tower Sky, a 120-story luxurious twin-tower building complex located in Yeouido, Seoul. He promises to spend Christmas Eve at an amusement park with his daughter Ha-na, but has to call it off when an upcoming party requires him overseeing the preparations. Attendees include tenants of the Tower Sky complex and its owner and president, Mr. Jo, as well as VIPs and South Korean politicians.

Jo and Mr. Cha, the Tower Sky's safety section head, decide to host the party despite the forecasted strong winds and the faulty water sprinklers of Riverview Tower, one of the two towers. That night, two helicopters are sprinkling snow near the party when updrafts cause the crafts to lose control. The lights attached to one helicopter crash into the glass bridge connecting the two towers, while the other crashes into the 63rd floor of the Riverview Tower.

The building catches fire because of leaking fuel, and pandemonium erupts as people attempt to flee. A team of firefighters arrives at the scene, led by Captain Kang Young-ki, who joined at the last minute despite being off-duty, including Sergeant Oh Byung-man and rookie fireman Lee Sun-woo. The squad enters the building when they bump into Dae-ho, who is frantically searching for his daughter, unaware that she is taking shelter inside the Chinese restaurant alongside Mr. Cha and Yoon-hee, Dae-ho's romantic interest, among other survivors.

Dae-ho leads the firefighting team through the quickest path to the server room where the helicopter crashed, and Young-ki hands him a radio and an oxygen mask so that he can go search for his daughter. They reach the server room on the 63rd floor, but can't extinguish the flames, even with Young-ki's resolute but risky maneuvers.

In an attempt to stop the fire from spreading, Jo decides to activate the firewalls, leaving Dae-ho, who finally reunited with Ha-na and the rest of the survivors, as well as many other people, trapped within the blazing floors. The firefighters attempt to destroy the firewall leading to the restaurant to free them, but the walls cause the entire floor to collapse. Dae-ho, under Yoon-hee's suggestion, directs the trapped survivors to jump onto the gondola in order to escape, but an elderly couple perishes during their descent, and Young-ki euthanizes a critically injured victim using morphine.

Dae-ho's group tries to escape to the other tower, the Cityview Tower, by crossing the skybridge between them, but the structure gives way and Cha falls to his death, with Ha-na and Sun-woo barely making it. The Riverview Tower then starts to buckle because of the fire damaging the structure due to its intense heat warping the building's steel frame, and Fire Commissioner Jang decides to demolish it to avoid it toppling over the other tower or the Yeongdeungpo District. He orders everyone in and around the complex to evacuate, and Young-ki uses Dae-ho's fingerprint access to discharge the tower's water tanks in order slow down the rate of collapse.

Young-ki and Dae-ho then ride the freight elevator in free-fall to quickly descend to the surface, and alongside pregnant woman Nam-ok, they manage to climb out before the elevator slams into the basement, trapping Yon-hee and Byung-man and leaving them slowly asphyxiated. Dae-ho voluntarily goes back inside Tower Sky along with Young-ki and his crew to rescue the trapped survivors. They leave the survivors on the storm drain and set out to detonate the rainwater storage tanks, hoping the fast-moving current will send them straight towards the Han River before the tower collapses. However, Young-ki loses the detonator before reaching the survivors.

Young-ki then sacrifices his own life by manually detonating the explosives, and the resulting rushing torrent carries the group towards the river, right as the firefighters blow up the Riverview Tower. The survivors are pulled out from the water by the rescue team, and Sun-woo and Byung-man salute their fallen captain.

Before the closing credits, a white chocolate cake, which was meant to be delivered to Kang Young-ki, is seen in an empty display case at the now-empty bakery. An aerial shot shows the 63 Building and the remains of Tower Sky, now consisting of the single 120-story Cityview Tower, with their surroundings covered in thick dust from the demolished Riverview Tower.

English dubbing

• Captain Kang Young-ki - Kirk Thornton
• Lee Dae-ho - Patrick Seitz
• Seo Yoon-hee - Erin Fitzgerald
• Sergeant Oh Byung-man - Sean Chiplock
• In-geon - Lucien Dodge
• Lee Sun-woo - Johnny Yong Bosch
• Lee Ha-na - Cassandra Lee
• Cha - Russel Jimmies
• Mr. Kim - Kyle Hebert
• Mr. Yoon - Steve Mann
• Young-cheol - Todd Haberkorn
• Min-jung - Erika Harlacher

Director Kim Ji-hoon (who previously helmed Sector 7 and May 18) was inspired by the 1974 Hollywood film The Towering Inferno (which is based on the book, also called The Tower), and his personal experience seeing the 63 Building in Seoul for the first time as a middle school student and imagining how it would feel to be trapped inside.

The crew built 26 different sets to create various spaces in the fictional 108-story Tower Sky such as a Chinese restaurant, elevators and a pedestrian overpass between the two blocks. For the scenes involving water on the 80th floor, actors Sol Kyung-gu and Kim Sang-kyung filmed in a water container set in Goyang City, Gyeonggi Province, without using stuntmen.

Kim worked on the film's post-production for two years. 1,700 cuts out of 3,000 were based on CGI and 500 of the CG cuts were full 3-D cut scenes. For more authenticity, live action shoots were combined with CGI, such as the shooting of a miniature in the United States with a motion control camera for the ending scene.

On its theater release on December 25, 2012, The Tower drew 431,759 admissions, the second highest opening day ticket sales in the history of Korean cinema (after The Thieves' 436,628). It sold two million tickets in its first week, 3.54 million by its second week, and 4.45 million by its third week. On January 22, 2013, it became the first Korean film in 2013 to reach the five million mark.

The film was pre-sold by CJ Entertainment to Entertainment One in UK, Splendid in Germany, Benelux, Zylo for French-speaking territories, Horizon International in Turkey, Rainbow Entertainment in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia; and Jonon Source in Mongolia.

The Tower earned HK$4,733,937 at the Hong Kong box office.

• Official website (in Korean)
• Official website (in English)
• The Tower at IMDb  
• The Tower at the Korean Movie Database
• The Tower at HanCinema