General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Hansan: Rising Dragon (한산: 용의 출현)

Hansan: Rising Dragon (한산: 용의 출현) is a 2022 South Korean historical war film directed by Kim Han-min that depicts the Battle of Hansando of July 1592, in which Admiral Yi Sun-sin's Joseon navy defeated the Japanese fleet during the Japanese invasions of Korea. It is the second installment of Kim's Yi Sun-sin trilogy and a prequel to The Admiral: Roaring Currents (2014), set five years before that film's Battle of Myeongnyang.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	July 27, 2022 (South Korea); distributed by Lotte Entertainment; produced by Big Stone Pictures¹
Director and writer	Kim Han-min, who also wrote the screenplay³
Subject	The Battle of Hansando, fought off Hansan Island on the lunar calendar date of July 8, 1592, during the Imjin War¹
Lead cast	Park Hae-il as Yi Sun-sin, Byun Yo-han as Wakizaka Yasuharu, Ahn Sung-ki as Eo Yeong-dam, Son Hyun-joo as Won Gyun¹
Runtime and rating	129 minutes; rated 12 and over in Korea¹
Box office	7,264,934 admissions and 73.7 billion won in South Korea, fourth place for 2022⁴
Production cost	30 billion won⁵

Spoilers

Story and tactics

The film opens in April 1592, shortly after the outbreak of the Imjin War, when Joseon lost its capital Hanyang to the Japanese army only 15 days after the invasion began. The Japanese forces, aiming to advance into Ming China, mass troops at Busan Port, while Yi Sun-sin, with the court in retreat, prepares a response. The plot turns on the geobukseon, the armored turtle ship: damaged in an earlier battle, its departure is delayed, and its design drawings are stolen by Japanese spies.¹

The battle itself centers on two elements. One is the hakikjin, the crane-wing formation, a U-shaped deployment into which Yi lures the Japanese warships before closing the wings; the film's subtitle refers to how this tactic and the geobukseon work together.¹⁰^•⁹ The other is the geobukseon itself, a turtle-shaped armored warship with iron spikes and a dragon head at the bow. Because little is known about how the historical ship actually looked or operated, the production team built two versions, one with two stories and one with three, adding their own ideas to the surviving sources.⁷

The naval battle runs 51 minutes, which the director identified as the film's highlight, and the film also dramatizes the intelligence war between the two sides in the period before the clash.¹¹^•¹⁰ The Japanese commander Wakizaka Yasuharu, played by Byun Yo-han, receives substantial screen time, and the film opens with his narration.¹²

Place in the trilogy

Kim Han-min planned the project as a trilogy about the battles of Admiral Yi Sun-sin (1545–1598) before The Admiral: Roaring Currents was made, and he has said he decided on the three-film structure while preparing that first installment.⁶^•⁷ The trilogy follows the historical order of the battles rather than the release order: Hansando in 1592, Myeongnyang in 1597, and the final Battle of Noryang in 1598, covered in Noryang: Deadly Sea (2023).⁸

Kim deliberately cast a different actor as Yi in each film. Choi Min-shik played the admiral in Roaring Currents as a fiery, unbending commander; Park Hae-il's Yi in Hansan is a younger strategist who leads through calculation and cooperation. Kim said historical records show that Yi in his forties was more of a scholar and rarely shared his thoughts, and that he wanted Park's calm exterior with inner strength to match.⁷^•⁹ In the director's words, Roaring Currents depicts Yi like fire and Hansan depicts him like water.⁵

Production

Filming ran from May 18 to September 30, 2020.³ Unlike Roaring Currents, which was shot aboard real ships at sea, Hansan used virtual production and relied heavily on computer graphics; the VFX supervisors have said that no ship was floated on the sea at Hansan, with all sea-battle scenes completed through CG and studio shots.⁷^•⁵ The production cost was 30 billion won, and the film was released simultaneously in the United States and Canada alongside its Korean opening.⁵

Box office

Two days before release the film recorded 147,909 advance ticket sales, breaking the recent presale record that had been held by Parasite (2019).¹³ It opened at number one on the daily chart with 386,000 admissions on July 27, pushing Minions 2 to second place.¹⁴ It passed 2 million admissions in its first weekend, 6 million on its 20th day, and 7 million on August 28, 2022.¹⁵^•¹⁶^•¹⁷

Final Korean admissions were 7,264,934 with a gross of 73,700,628,377 won, ranking fourth among all films released in South Korea in 2022, behind The Roundup, Top Gun: Maverick, and Avatar: The Way of Water.⁴ In North America, distributed by Well Go USA from July 29, 2022, it grossed about 865,900 dollars, the third-highest-grossing Korean film there that year.¹⁸^•¹⁹ The film crossed its break-even point of 6 million admissions on its 20th day of release.²⁰

Reception

Korean critics gave the film a generally favorable professional score of 6.80 on Cine21's five-critic scale, with an audience score of 7.83.¹ Reviewers credited the film with correcting the criticized excesses of its predecessor: film critic Yoon Sung-eun described it as a modern war film that portrays the battle through strategy and tactics rather than overt heroism, and industry figures at release said the excessive melodrama and functional characters criticized in Roaring Currents had mostly been fixed.²¹^•²⁰ Recurring criticisms, in Korea and abroad, targeted the slow middle stretch before the battle and invented plot elements, including a fabricated rivalry within the Japanese command and fictional characters such as Im Jun-young, whose storylines take up a substantial share of the 129-minute runtime.²² On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 67% critics score and an 86% audience score.¹⁸

Despite falling well short of Roaring Currents' record 17.6 million admissions, the film was a commercial success in a recovering post-pandemic market, and it was one of six films of 2022 to draw more than 5 million admissions in Korea, alongside The Roundup, Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, Confidential Assignment 2: International, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.²³^•²⁴^•²⁸ A revised cut, Hansan: Redux, was later released on Netflix, while the original version streamed on Coupang Play in Korea from August 29, 2022.²⁵^•²³

Awards

The film won Best Director for Kim Han-min at the 2022 Buil Film Awards.²⁶ Park Ji-hwan, who played the shipbuilder Na Dae-yong, won Best Supporting Actor for the film at the 58th Daejong Film Awards, the 43rd Blue Dragon Film Awards, and the 59th Baeksang Arts Awards.²⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released since 2000 › Released 2017 to 2026

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?