Which country - where craven ideology still divides a nation - is still technically at war fifty-odd years after hostilities ceased?

It's Korea, where the uneasy détente between north and south has been overshadowed, in Hollywood at least, by Vietnam, Afghanistan and the two Gulf Wars.

To redress the lack of global recognition for his country's plight, South Korean director Kang Je-Gyu has been busy piecing together this mammoth enterprise.

Apparently the biggest film in Asian cinema history, it boasts 25,000 extras, specially-built locomotives and tanks and more than 200 artificial corpses. Sounds promising.

And visually it delivers, with sublimely-orchestrated scenes of vicious close-quarter combat making Saving Private Ryan look like a stroll on the beach.

Where it isn't so convincing is the narrative, which follows two brothers - fatherly shoe shine boy Jin-tae (Dong-gun) and college kid Young-shin (Eun-joo) - inhabiting roles that have walked straight off Walton's Mountain.

We follow the literal brothers-in-arms as they are reluctantly recruited into the South Korean army following North Korea's surprise invasion in 1950.

Together they weather countless campaigns with Jin-tae chillingly evolving into a dispassionate killing machine to his sibling's increasing dismay.

Western audiences may find the relationship between the two verging on the cloying but this exagerrated emotional bonding tends to be a feature of Korean movies.

Better to see the movie as a visceral evocation of a war that many of did not know started and fewer still realise hasn't finished.

Tim Evans