WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS
Good News (2025) opens with a disclaimer that, while the story is based on real events, most of it is entirely fictional. And this largely summarises the movie overall – a fact-based retelling of the bizarre hijacking of Japan Air Lines Flight 351 blown out into an extremely exaggerated satirical comedy. Its ending, a largely bloodless affair that prevented the infamous event from becoming a true tragedy, mostly embellishes what really happened with presumably fictional details. The line between real and imagined is deliberately blurry; the true stuff is almost too silly to believe, and the made-up stuff could easily have happened. This is the space that director Byun Sung-hyun has colonised for the Netflix movie, making a mockery of fact and fiction both.
And it totally works. It’s difficult to “break down” in the traditional sense, though, because some of it is obviously based on the facts, some of it obviously isn’t, and some of it has a shrugging “yeah, maybe” quality that leaves things up to the audience’s interpretation. But just for fun, let’s go over what happened, both in the movie and in reality, so that I can point out very cleverly that the real truth of the details scarcely matters.
The Hijacking Of Flight 351
On March 31, 1970, nine members of the Red Army Faction, a militant communist outfit that had declared independence from its New Left parent organisation in the hopes of establishing a worldwide revolution against the United States and its allies through violent proletarian uprising, hijacked Japan Air Lines Flight 351 with katanas and a homemade bomb. Their intention was to fly to Cuba and train in communist camps, a detail that is left out of this movie, which instead immediately cons the bumbling hijackers into re-routing to Pyongyang, North Korea, on account of limited fuel.
The strange flourish, though, is that Flight 351 was never going to Pyongyang. After a refuelling stop, the hijackers were given a map of the Korean Peninsula and a note instructing them to tune their radios to a specific frequency to be guided by air traffic controllers who deliberately led them to Gimpo Airport in Seoul, South Korea, which had been disguised as a North Korean base. In the movie, this comes about slightly differently in a sequence modelled after a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, but the outcome is the same. The flight lands at a disguised Gimpo Airport, the hijackers see through the ruse, and the mission becomes figuring out how to get the hostages off the plane without the hijackers detonating the bomb.
For this purpose, the movie deploys a probably fictional character named Nobody, a fixer appointed by the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Park Sang-hyeon, who enlists the services of ROK Air Force Lieutenant Seo Go-myung to help pull off the risky schemes. Park is trying to save face for Korea. Nobody is trying to further his own career, and Japanese Minister Sugimoto and Deputy Minister Ishida are trying to handle the situation in a way most accommodating to Japan.
Once Bitten, Twice Shy
The problem with the hijackers seeing through the fake airport debacle is that it makes them less susceptible to further manipulation. It gives them some negotiating power. With the hostages still on board and one of their own stabbed as a functional ticking clock device, the hijackers threaten to blow themselves and the passengers up if they’re not allowed to leave for Pyongyang.
Nobody tries to strong-arm the Red Army Faction into releasing the hostages by pushing the story that there is a South Korean passenger aboard, driving anti-Communist sentiment. An official government order pushes the narrative that the hijackers will be allowed to leave if they release the hostages, but once bitten, twice shy, so they don’t believe the deal will be honoured.
More desperate and indeed personal measures need to be taken in light of this. With Park out of the way, having absconded on Nobody’s advice to let Seo take the blame for everything, Nobody and Seo himself push on with a more direct solution.
Hong Kyung in Good News | Image via Netflix
A Personal Touch
Seo decides to approach the plane in person, which is the first good idea anyone has had since it’s a pretty meaningful gesture to show the human side of a national military service. The Red Army Faction respects a hero, someone willing to put his life on the line for everyday people, since they believe that’s what they’re doing. But the bigger play comes from Nobody, who subtly compels Ishida to offer himself up as a hostage in exchange for the passengers.
Considering Ishida a respectable replacement for the passengers, given his government position, the hijackers take him and release the others. They’re allowed to land in Pyongyang and eventually return Ishida and the plane’s pilots safely. The gesture was inspired by the idea of a government official being willing to endanger himself for the common folk he supposedly represented. But on a geopolitical level, it was ultimately Japan securing credit for solving the problem, meaning that Nobody and Seo don’t get credit for any of their actions.
Fact vs Fiction
Some of Good News – the broad strokes, at least – is true, but its ending deliberately muddies the waters by implying at least some of the official story, such as Japan’s Vice Minister for Transport, Shinjiro Yamamura, offering himself up as a hostage, was a calculated political play with somebody else pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Nobody might be a fiction, but he exists to prove a very real point that the true movers and shakers in geopolitics are ghosts, people who are never appropriately credited for their actions because they refuse to accept it.
True, too, is that most political leaders hide away from situations like this and relentlessly pass the buck to others, which is very much the case all throughout the movie, with almost every nation involved behaving in precisely this way. It’s rare that a Korean film will be this openly critical of South Korea and its officials, but here we are. Every politician and military leader in Good News is presented in the same arch, self-serving way.
By this logic, then, even the supposedly heroic gestures are fairly empty and facile. Seo is the closest thing the movie has to a hero. Everyone else is some variety of stooge, and every decision made, whether it’s for the greater good or not, is some kind of compromise. Which details are true doesn’t matter, since it’s all true in some way, and all make-believe in another. What works about Good News is how intimately it understands this.