His latest, “Hope,” This is his biggest and wildest film to date. But despite its massive scale and running time, it rarely pauses to take a breath.

Although some of Na’s contemporaries are better known in the West, the South Korean writer-director has been a must-see filmmaker for two decades for breathless spectacles laced with sharp satire and wry humanity. His appropriately titled 2008 debut film, “The Chaser”, focused on a pimp and former police officer driving through Seoul at night trying to find a missing sex worker.

Since then, the long-running search has become more elaborate and extreme. The gambling addicted taxi driver is on the run. A police officer investigates the cause of a disease outbreak in rural Korea.

“Hope,” his first film in a decade, is so vast in scope that Na spent two years in post-production before it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May — in a slightly different cut than the one arriving in theaters now. As if the 156-minute run time wasn’t enough, it was also made with a sequel in mind.

But over the course of those two-and-a-half-plus hours, “Hope” rocks its way through genres the way the Kool-Aid Man bounces off the walls. It is not always a smooth journey. The CGI in “Hope” won’t win any awards. And the film has become very long, which has slowed down its pace somewhat. But it’s often thrillingly shape-shifting: a spectacularly unwieldy spectacle that blends monster movie and science fiction into a blistering and frightening saga of otherness – human and otherwise.

Signs reading “Defend the Nation Against Infiltration” can be seen in the city of Hope Harbor on the South Korean side of the demilitarized zone. There, local police chief Bum-seok is investigating a mysterious animal attack. The best guess of a group of hunters led by Sung-ki is that a tiger came from North Korea through the barbed wire fields.

However, Bum-seok is soon on the lookout for something that is apparently much larger and more destructive than a loose tiger. Long before he – or we – can see what’s going on out of control, he stalks through the wreckage with increasing panic. Almost all his breathless dialogues are made up of abusive words.

It will take us about an hour to see what he wants. Once we do that, there’s a little disappointment. The CGI makeup of the creature – a giant but lean and sinewy alien that sometimes stands tall and sometimes runs on all fours – is a bit schlocky in design. But it’s telling that Na’s film switches to a slow-motion close-up when Bum-seok recognizes something like pain in the marauding monster’s eyes.

Nah movies have never been particularly kind to executives; They are usually shown as either incompetent or corrupt. In “Hope”, they are mostly floundering or out of their depth. But Bum-seok is at least moving forward, even if not as vigorously as his fellow officer Sung-ae. She joins the chase midway, speeding away in a squad car while shooting out the window. This “Squid Game” is Hoyeon’s big-screen debut and, from the very first moment, she’s winning.

After a chase – which lasts for the better part of an hour – Bum-seok and Sung-ae begin to try to investigate what they have encountered. This is possibly the strangest part of the film, but it’s also when Na is at her most mischievous. For example, the alien’s corpse is medically examined not with cool precision but with a chain saw. And then there is the unforgettable eyewitness account of a villager who saw the aliens in the forest – frightened, hiding and trying to stop diarrhea. It becomes useless.

You can see such digressions in “Hope” as satanic actions. But they also reflect Na’s insistence on making a human-scale film – a funny, funny, ridiculous one – even at the height of sci-fi. This sensibility makes “Hope,” beautifully shot by cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, a deeply unexpected thing despite its familiar genre setup.

Meanwhile, the film focuses on Sung-ki and the hunters’ separate pursuits going on in the forest. There, we learn more about the extraterrestrial visitors. In the leap to different species of empathy, “hope” also begins to shift into their perspective. The lead characters are played by a trio of Hollywood stars, though they are unrecognizable under the CGI-rendered alien skin. In the film, their voices get their own subtitles, and “Hope’s” sympathies begin to spread across the universe.

It remains to be seen whether Na’s film, said to be the most expensive Korean film ever made, gets a follow-up. But now, we get the film’s grand, galloping finale. Until then, “Hope” is mostly a messy movie. Production designer Lee Hwok-young delights in the wreckage of the destruction. Yet “Hope” delivers a sensational, open-road, wide-ranging chase scene that is one of the most thrilling and ridiculous sequences of the year. Should NA continue this saga? That final sequence gives you hope.

The Neon film “Hope,” released in theaters on Friday, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violent content and language. In Korean with English subtitles. Running time: 156 minutes. Three out of four stars.

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