It made out Hal was being a moral coward. That is, Hal didn’t want to kill, but by playing the “bait” for traps so his fellow pilots can shoot down (and kill) enemy pilots was simply knowingly letting others to kill for him.

I agree with you in principle.

I think what Cooke should have done was had Hal speaking Korean phrases phonetically, spelling them with the roman alphabet. It makes more sense that Hal and other soldiers would have learned simple Korean phrases phonetically by rote — without the context and sentence structure, the same way travelers learn a few phrases to ‘get by’. The readers should have been wondering what Hal was trying to say (thinking it was something in English) at the same time as Lois, and we should learn what it was at the same time she was told.

Under the heading of “things this scene reminds me of” it’s “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” and to some extent Harvey Kurtzman’s “Corpse on the Imjin!” (another moment?).

I had a total four moments from this series. I hadn’t counted this one. I’m not sure about the two that occurs after the battle planning session. We’ll see.

And that scene is a perfect example of why the comic is superior to the animated movie. In the cartoon, we get a very graphic, violent shot of Hal shooting the Korean soldier, while more is left up to the imagination in the comic, leaving us with a greater emotional layout in terms of creating suspense. This scene is also awesome in the way that it showcases the paradoxes of war. War has rules and boundaries that are sublimated here, especially since you’ve got the helicopter basically laughing at the Koreans who continue to fight, while still blowing them up. They justify their own violent actions by saying they need to save Hal, but are really acting no differently than the soldier trying to kill him.

Fair enough. But the first sentence that Hal utters is just jibberish with every words spelled wrong. As you pointed out Hal should be poor in Korean but what he says is not really Korean. (well the first sentence.)

Lets say that there is a chracter who is supposed to be poor at English (Overman in Final Crisis).

While the chracter’s dialouge should reflect the chracter’s poor language skill it shouldn’t be written as this right?:

“I afg Ofernan.”

Consider that the poor Korean could have been a deliberate choice. How good do you expect Hal Jordan’s Korean to be?

The Korean in the scence was complete BS. I had to practically dicipher that line because the spelling and grammer were so inaccurate. (I am a Korean)

I know it is a minor criticism that not a lot of people will notice. But for me, Hal’s Korean dialogue reduced the impact of the last scence.