11
25
ElBee
Adorkable Heights, State of Oblivion, Kdramaland
This review may contain spoilers
Started pretty brilliant, halfway or so through started falling apart
I LOVE the premise of this. God how I love it! Unfortunately, between a director who has, in the works I've seen, been pretty choppy about putting scenes together and a writer with no drama experience on paper, it has seriously fallen apart in ways that make it only watchable for the action and fx... The dialogue became downright "12 year old fanfiction" level corny and the core emotion, as well as the actors depicting it moment to moment, gets rather lost when, you know, you don't put the scenes together logically.
It had massive potential. Japan could seriously take this and do something magnificent, I think. It is YET ANOTHER instance where anything remotely involving sci-fi elements becomes a handicap simply because it's airing in Korea and in turn made by people who grew up with this odd inability to take notes from over 40 years of badass content worldwide. I just want to sigh.
I'm still giving it a 7 because Park Sung Woong and (weird Japanese 90's hair aside) Choi Jin Hyuk and Jo Dong Hyuk all kill their scenes and Park Sun Ho is awfully cute in this... though made a bit of a wimp overall except for one episode he was allowed to be a bit strategic. The worst offense is Bradley: Jang In Seob's character. SO MUCH POTENTIAL and I really like that there's a backdoor to communicate with these people because of their hyperadvanced chips... in the end, though, they really didn't imagine enough for the guy or the genius Susan (Jang Seo Kyung's character) who supposedly gets a slightly sinister smile turning humans into machines, like they took a psycho genius from a mental ward and made her a police agency doctor...
They give SUCH underdeveloped backstories that behold, here is character-as-prop #1... and 2-32 are over there. It's sad. They should've stuck to the characters and honored the talent they hired.
That said, I don't really regret watching if only because hey... they're kinda smoldering hot a lot of the time, not gonna lie. It took me this long to realize that Jo Dong Hyuk (Tae Woong) is who played the super sexy painter in Love Affairs in the Afternoon. I love that the 4 men-Park Sung Woong, Choi Jin Hyuk, Jo Dong Hyuk, and Park Sun Ho (who I'd seen in Best Chicken as the lead but otherwise only in support roles) are all attractive in totally different ways. Bradley (Jang In Seob) is definitely more support material but he looks pretty handsome in this, too... pity there weren't more females, but that's pretty much every OCN story of this kind and really anything revolving around crime and police/detectives/investigators... Guess that's one reason I have so much affection when they DO put females in high positions. At least let us dream of slightly more equal roles. The character of Jung Hye In, Mi Na, is kind of a wimp, too-flexible, yes, but they didn't have her using her different build the way anyone would, well, anyone trying to avoid horrible injuries. Suppose she's not that 'anyone' in this. Her role in Graceful Family-which was much more female-centric-was far more powerful than this where she was literally programmed to be a damsel detecting distress of the one they -really- wanted most of all to be their star case for this.
Good message, carried out a bit... hmm... poorly. I still enjoyed it. The action is generally really fun. It took til 14 and 15 to get my personal "from episode 2 or 3" goal accomplished, but they did it, just slowly so as to frustrate me. The ending was a bit anticlimactic for me, too. That said, though, I'll also say this: they did well w/Park Sung Woong's character, one really marked moment of the finale-well, 2 for many, just one w/him and the head of Argos for me, that showed what perhaps we needed more of-focused energy... but his character was pretty good, mostly (the director-writer-producers-editors just didn't really let things unravel in the right order), but in turn they were lousy about keeping an air of mystery for other characters we shouldn't see through so very plainly... that alone dropped its score but the writing/direction were the main flaws. The acting made up for a pretty decent bit of it, but there are hundreds of shows I'd recommend before this, probably a good 50 action shows I find superior just from SK-add Japan's movies and you will have tons more. Sci-fi is still a weakly executed genre in SK... but they're working on it.
It had massive potential. Japan could seriously take this and do something magnificent, I think. It is YET ANOTHER instance where anything remotely involving sci-fi elements becomes a handicap simply because it's airing in Korea and in turn made by people who grew up with this odd inability to take notes from over 40 years of badass content worldwide. I just want to sigh.
I'm still giving it a 7 because Park Sung Woong and (weird Japanese 90's hair aside) Choi Jin Hyuk and Jo Dong Hyuk all kill their scenes and Park Sun Ho is awfully cute in this... though made a bit of a wimp overall except for one episode he was allowed to be a bit strategic. The worst offense is Bradley: Jang In Seob's character. SO MUCH POTENTIAL and I really like that there's a backdoor to communicate with these people because of their hyperadvanced chips... in the end, though, they really didn't imagine enough for the guy or the genius Susan (Jang Seo Kyung's character) who supposedly gets a slightly sinister smile turning humans into machines, like they took a psycho genius from a mental ward and made her a police agency doctor...
They give SUCH underdeveloped backstories that behold, here is character-as-prop #1... and 2-32 are over there. It's sad. They should've stuck to the characters and honored the talent they hired.
That said, I don't really regret watching if only because hey... they're kinda smoldering hot a lot of the time, not gonna lie. It took me this long to realize that Jo Dong Hyuk (Tae Woong) is who played the super sexy painter in Love Affairs in the Afternoon. I love that the 4 men-Park Sung Woong, Choi Jin Hyuk, Jo Dong Hyuk, and Park Sun Ho (who I'd seen in Best Chicken as the lead but otherwise only in support roles) are all attractive in totally different ways. Bradley (Jang In Seob) is definitely more support material but he looks pretty handsome in this, too... pity there weren't more females, but that's pretty much every OCN story of this kind and really anything revolving around crime and police/detectives/investigators... Guess that's one reason I have so much affection when they DO put females in high positions. At least let us dream of slightly more equal roles. The character of Jung Hye In, Mi Na, is kind of a wimp, too-flexible, yes, but they didn't have her using her different build the way anyone would, well, anyone trying to avoid horrible injuries. Suppose she's not that 'anyone' in this. Her role in Graceful Family-which was much more female-centric-was far more powerful than this where she was literally programmed to be a damsel detecting distress of the one they -really- wanted most of all to be their star case for this.
Good message, carried out a bit... hmm... poorly. I still enjoyed it. The action is generally really fun. It took til 14 and 15 to get my personal "from episode 2 or 3" goal accomplished, but they did it, just slowly so as to frustrate me. The ending was a bit anticlimactic for me, too. That said, though, I'll also say this: they did well w/Park Sung Woong's character, one really marked moment of the finale-well, 2 for many, just one w/him and the head of Argos for me, that showed what perhaps we needed more of-focused energy... but his character was pretty good, mostly (the director-writer-producers-editors just didn't really let things unravel in the right order), but in turn they were lousy about keeping an air of mystery for other characters we shouldn't see through so very plainly... that alone dropped its score but the writing/direction were the main flaws. The acting made up for a pretty decent bit of it, but there are hundreds of shows I'd recommend before this, probably a good 50 action shows I find superior just from SK-add Japan's movies and you will have tons more. Sci-fi is still a weakly executed genre in SK... but they're working on it.
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