Reel Rundown: ‘The Great Flood’ is another natural disaster movie, but with a relevant AI twist

Disaster movies tend to follow a standard format. They typically start with some crisis, maybe a deadly inferno, a rogue asteroid or even an alien invasion.

Each movie then introduces a series of characters, explains their relationships and then focuses on their struggle to survive – if they even can.

“The Great Flood,” a Netflix feature directed and co-written by South Korean filmmaker Byung-woo Kim does something different.

It starts out in a predictable manner. A single mother, An-na (Kim Da-mi), awakens one morning to her 6-year-old son Ja-in (Kwan Eun-seong) begging her to let him go swimming. She quickly discovers why he is so insistent: Their apartment is slowly filling with water.

This is a big problem because they live on the third floor of a 30-story building. What to do?

An-na quickly goes into action, ignoring her son – who is annoyingly insistent that she pay attention to him – grabbing what she can while trying to make sense of the telephone call she has just received. It turns out that she is an important scientist, one of two people who have been working on an artificial intelligence project, and a team has been dispatched to pick her up.

What she needs to do then is make it up those 27 floors to the roof where a helicopter will be waiting to take her to safety. But even as she gets help from a security officer, Son (Park Hae-soo), she and Ja-in face a cluster of problems.

Not only are the stairwells jammed with other building dwellers, but the flood waters – apparently caused by, yes, an asteroid crashing into the Earth – keeps rising. Add to that the occasional gas explosion, murderous looters and eventually armed and masked gunmen, and An-na’s task grows ever more complicated.

For some 50 minutes of the film’s hour-and-49-minutes running time, “The Great Flood” continues on this kind of predictable track. Until it doesn’t, which will interest some viewers while simply confusing – and maybe irritating – others.

Because that’s the point at which Kim (aided by co-screenwriter Han Ji-su) opts to go from fantastically realistic to something more metaphysical. Instead of aping, say, Dawyne Johnson battling to save his family from nature-gone-crazy in “San Andreas,” Kim takes a plot path similar to what Tom Cruise experiences, again and again, in “Edge of Tomorrow.”

The key to everything is An-na’s AI work and the potential that her research has for helping repopulate Earth following a mass-extinction event. At least that seems to be director Kim’s point. Those of us who don’t speak Korean, and have to depend on the English subtitles, are forced to guess at what Kim is trying to say.

To be fair, though, metaphysics involving space and time – even if presented in an overly complex manner – can add something unique to what has become a tired genre. Most other disaster epics these days emphasize realistic looking computer graphics over original plotlines.

And to be sure, the CGI work in “The Great Flood” is as impressive as you’re apt to experience. Plus, the action is quick-paced and the acting – particularly by Kim Da-mi – is suitably intense. Sometimes that’s all you want for a Friday-night streaming view.

That, of course, and a tub full of homemade popcorn.