In 1928, Kim Jun-shik (Shin Sang-yeob) works alongside his father (
Chun Ho-jin) and sister Eun-soo (
Lee Yeon-hee) on the farm of the Hasegawa family (Shiro Sano, Kumi Nakamura) in
Gyeong-seong (present-day
Seoul),
Japanese-occupied Korea. Jun-shik and Tatsuo Hasegawa (
Sung Yu-bin) are interested in running. When they are teenagers (
Do Ji-han, Yukichi Kobayashi), they have become fierce competitors. Tatsuo's grandfather (Isao Natsuyagi) is killed in a bombing by a
Korean freedom fighter, and Korean runner
Sohn Kee-chung (Yoon Hee-won) wins a marathon race against Japanese competitors, further inflaming already-tense Korean–Japanese tensions. Ten years later in May 1938, Jun-shik (
Jang Dong-gun) is working as a rickshaw runner. Koreans have been banned from taking part in sports events, and Tatsuo (
Joe Odagiri), now a fierce Japanese nationalist, has sworn that a Korean will never again win a race. He has been accepted by a medical college in
Berlin,
Nazi Germany, but Tatsuo decides to stay in Korea to run in the All Japan Trials for the marathon. Sohn secretly backs Jun-shik, who wins the race, but Tatsuo is awarded the medal when Jun-shik is disqualified for allegedly cheating. A riot by Korean spectators ensues, and as punishment, those who started the riot are forcibly drafted into the
Imperial Japanese Army, including Jun-shik and his friend Lee Jong-dae (
Kim In-kwon), who has a crush on Eun-soo. In July 1939, the Koreans are deployed to the
battle at Nomonhan on the border with
Mongolia, where Shirai (雪莱/徐莱；
Fan Bingbing), a Chinese sniper avenging the deaths of her family at the hands of the Japanese, is captured and tortured. Tatsuo, now a colonel, arrives and takes command and forces Takakura (高倉;
Shingo Tsurumi), the unit's commander who is fairer to the Koreans, to commit
seppuku. After refusing to join a
suicide squad, Jun-shik is imprisoned with Shirai but escapes with her, Jong-dae, and two other friends to the
Khalkhin Gol, where they spot a massive
Red Army advance. Jun-shik runs back to warn the Japanese forces, while Shirai sacrifices herself to shoot down an
I-16 Ishak, but Tatsuo refuses to order a retreat. During the one-sided battle, a tank shell explodes near Tatsuo and Jun-shik, knocking them unconscious. Jun-shik and Tatsuo are captured and, by February 1940, are held in
Kungur prisoner-of-war camp south-east of
Perm,
Soviet Union, where both Koreans and Japanese are incarcerated together. Jong-dae, under the name of "Anton", has become a pro-Soviet work-unit leader who helps his fellow Koreans and abuses the Japanese prisoners. Jun-shik humiliates Tatsuo in a sanctioned fight to the death, but refuses to kill him, and both get punished together. Later, a riot incited by a work accident leads to Tatsuo and Jun-shik being sentenced to
execution by firing squad, but it is interrupted by the
German declaration of war on the Soviet Union, prompting a mass conscription of POWs; Jong-dae volunteers Jun-shik and Tatsuo into the Red Army, saving their lives. In December 1941, their
penal unit engages the
Wehrmacht at
Dedovsk, but many of them are killed, including Jong-dae. Jun-shik convinces Tatsuo to don German uniforms scavenged from bodies and trek over the mountains into German territory. During their expedition, Jun-shik realizes Tatsuo is injured and attempts to find medicine for him in an abandoned town, but German soldiers find them and, unable to understand what they are saying, capture them. By 1944, Tatsuo has been enlisted into the Wehrmacht and transferred to a unit in
Normandy,
Occupied France, where he is manning the
Atlantic Wall. Noticing a man running on the beach, Tatsuo catches up to him and notices it is Jun-shik, who he has not seen since 1941. They plan to
desert by boarding a ship in
Cherbourg to safely sail away from the theatre before ultimately returning home to Korea. However, their attempt to leave is interrupted by the
Normandy landings, and a German officer locks the pair into a machine gun
pillbox. They force their way out as the
United States Army scales the cliffside, and attempt to sprint away inland, but Jun-shik is mortally wounded in the chest by shrapnel from
naval artillery. Noticing
American paratroopers landing nearby, and knowing they could kill Tatsuo for being Japanese, Jun-shik forcibly replaces Tatsuo's identification tags with his own and tells Tatsuo, "he is now Jun-shik", before dying in his arms as the paratroopers surround them. After the war, Tatsuo runs in the
athletics event at the
1948 Summer Olympics in
London, participating as "Jun-Shik Kim". In a
flashback to his first encounter with Jun-shik in Gyeong-seong, Tatsuo monologues that when he first met him, he was secretly happy to have found someone who could be his running mate. ==Cast==