Ma Dong-seok’s post-apocalyptic action film for Netflix is the directing debut of Heo Myung-haeng, the martial arts director behind his fight scenes, and it lives in the shadow of Concrete Utopia, a film its director insists it has nothing to do with.

Badland Hunters is a 2024 South Korean post-apocalyptic action film directed by Heo Myung-haeng and released worldwide on Netflix on 26 January 2024. Ma Dong-seok, also known internationally as Don Lee, plays Nam-san, a hunter who survives in the ruins of Seoul, alongside Lee Hee-jun, Lee Jun-young and Roh Jeong-eui. Its Korean title, Hwangya, means wilderness. The film runs 107 minutes and was produced by Climax Studio, with Big Punch Pictures and Nova Film as co-producers.

The premise: a hunter, a village and a doctor’s experiments

The story is set years after a massive earthquake has levelled Seoul. The state is gone, the city has become a lawless desert, and water is the scarcest resource of all. Nam-san, played by Ma Dong-seok, hunts whatever he can find and trades it to keep his small community going, helped by his young partner Choi Ji-wan, played by Lee Jun-young.

One of the people he looks after is Han Su-na, played by Roh Jeong-eui, a teenager who lives in the settlement with her grandmother. When Su-na is taken away to a fortified apartment complex, the hunter and his partner go after her.

The complex is run by Yang Gi-su, played by Lee Hee-jun, the doctor who survived the catastrophe. Behind the promise of safety and supplies, he has been gathering teenagers and using them in illegal experiments with a serum he believes can keep people alive indefinitely. A woman posing as a teacher, played by Jang Young-nam, recruits families with children of the right age, and a special forces sergeant, Lee Eun-ho, played by Ahn Ji-hye, ends up on Nam-san’s side. What Gi-su is really after, and how the rescue ends, is not spoiled here.

Badland Hunters - Netflix — Badland Hunters – Netflix

A stunt veteran’s first film as director

Heo Myung-haeng, born in 1979, spent more than two decades as a stuntman and martial arts director before this film. His first credits go back to Shiri in 1999, and he went on to design the action for some of the most successful Korean thrillers of the century, including I Saw the Devil, New World, Hunt and The Roundup films, which earned him the technical award at the Blue Dragon Film Awards in 2022.

His working relationship with Ma Dong-seok is the reason the film exists. At the Seoul press conference on 16 January 2024, the star explained why he pushed his long-time action designer into the director’s chair: “While many think that designing action is just about making moves, it requires a lot of understanding of emotion and drama. I’m sure that Heo already knows a lot about movie directing in that context. So I wanted him to debut as a director.” According to The Korea Herald, the two developed the film together from the screenplay stage onwards.

Heo described his own approach in a single word. “I tried to design the action sequences based on the main keyword of the film, survival, more than anything else,” he told reporters. Ma Dong-seok added that the setting allowed him to step away from his usual style: his crime films rely heavily on boxing-inspired punches, while Badland Hunters mixes in techniques derived from jiu-jitsu, something he said was only possible in an apocalyptic, fantasy-like world.

The script and the crew

The screenplay is credited to Kim Bo-tong and Kwak Jae-min. Kim Bo-tong is the cartoonist and writer behind D.P., the webtoon about the military unit that hunts army deserters, which he also adapted as a co-writer of the Netflix series in 2021. Lee Jun-young was also part of that series’ cast.

Behind the camera, the cinematographer is Byun Bong-sun, the score is by Kim Dong-wook, and the editing is credited to Nam Na-young and Ha Mi-ra. Byun Seung-min produced the film alongside Choi Won-ki and Ma Dong-seok himself, who has increasingly worked as a producer on his own vehicles.

A sequel to Concrete Utopia, or not

The most persistent question about Badland Hunters is its relationship with Concrete Utopia, the 2023 disaster thriller directed by Um Tae-hwa and starring Lee Byung-hun, Park Seo-joon and Park Bo-young. That film, based on the second part of Kim Soongnyung’s webtoon Pleasant Outcast, follows the residents of the only apartment block left standing in Seoul after a huge earthquake. It opened in Korean cinemas on 9 August 2023 and was South Korea’s submission for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, although it did not make the shortlist.

The two projects share a starting point and a producer: development on Badland Hunters began in late 2021, once Concrete Utopia had been made, and Byun Seung-min is the only key crew member who worked on both. Early Korean press coverage presented the new film as an expansion of the same world, and some English-language references still describe it as a standalone sequel set three years after the earthquake.

Heo Myung-haeng did not accept that label. At the January 2024 press conference he stressed, according to The Korea Herald, that Badland Hunters had nothing to do with Concrete Utopia, contrary to the speculation that the two films shared a world. The safest reading is that it is a separate story built from the same premise of a Seoul destroyed by an earthquake.

From a 2022 shoot to a Netflix premiere

The cast was reported by the Korean press in January 2022, with Lee Hee-jun confirmed the following month. Ma Dong-seok later said he had suggested Lee Hee-jun for the role after the two worked together on Ryoo Seung-wan’s The Unjust in 2010, while Lee Jun-young, who had worked with Heo on the martial arts of Brave Citizen, said he joined to support the director’s debut.

Filming ran from 15 February to 18 May 2022. Ahn Ji-hye, who plays the sergeant Eun-ho, reportedly performed 99 per cent of her own action scenes. The film was initially conceived for a theatrical release, but it ended up as a Netflix original: the platform officially announced it on 2 November 2023, with a press release that promised expansive apocalyptic landscapes and heart-pounding action sequences, and released it in 190 countries less than three months later.

The cast around Ma Dong-seok

Ma Dong-seok, born in 1971, became an American citizen as a young man and returned to South Korea in his thirties to act. Supporting roles in The Unjust and Nameless Gangster were followed by the breakthrough of Train to Busan in 2016 and the role of detective Ma Seok-do in The Outlaws in 2017, the start of The Roundup franchise. He made his Hollywood debut as Gilgamesh in Marvel‘s Eternals in 2021 and was named Gallup Korea’s film actor of the year in 2018, 2023 and 2024.

Lee Hee-jun, born in Daegu in 1979, came from the theatre and is known for 1987: When the Day Comes and The Man Standing Next. Lee Jun-young, born in 1997, debuted in 2014 as a member of the boy band U-KISS before building an acting career with D.P. and Mask Girl. Roh Jeong-eui, born in 2001, has acted since childhood and is known for 18 Again, Our Beloved Summer and the Netflix series Hierarchy, released a few months after this film.

A crowded Korean apocalypse

Badland Hunters arrived in a busy corner of Korean genre production. Train to Busan had turned the national disaster film into an export in 2016, Peninsula returned to the same zombie-ridden country in 2020, and Netflix itself had spent several years financing Korean visions of collapse, from the series Sweet Home to Black Knight, a 2023 series set in a polluted, desert-like Korea where couriers deliver oxygen and food. The wasteland as an arena for physical action has an older ancestor in George Miller’s Mad Max films.

What sets this film apart from most of those titles is the star at its centre. Ma Dong-seok’s screen persona, the tough guy who settles things with his fists, was built in contemporary crime stories. Badland Hunters transplants that persona into a dystopia, with the same action team behind it.

How it landed on Netflix

According to Netflix’s own Top 10 data, Badland Hunters was the most-watched non-English film on the platform in the week of its release, with 14.3 million views from 22 to 28 January 2024. It stayed at number one in the following two weeks, with 18.1 million and 6.1 million views, and spent a fourth week in the list, in seventh place, adding up to about 41 million views in total.

Where Badland Hunters sits two years on

For Heo Myung-haeng, the film turned out to be the first of two directing jobs in quick succession. The Roundup: Punishment, the fourth film in Ma Dong-seok’s crime franchise, which he also directed, was screened as a Berlinale Special Gala on 23 February 2024, opened in Korean cinemas on 24 April 2024 and grossed 80.4 million dollars worldwide, the second-highest total for a Korean film that year.

Seen from 2026, Badland Hunters is the more unusual of the two: a stuntman’s first film as director, a star stepping briefly out of his police-procedural comfort zone, and a disputed branch of the Concrete Utopia story. Its familiar premise was never hidden; what it offers is a chance to see what Ma Dong-seok and his long-time fight designer do when the city around them has disappeared.

Tags: Netflix, action, sci-fi, Ma Dong-seok