strevisa
Toronto
Money Heist: Korea - Joint Economic Area - Part 1
9 people found this review helpful
Extremely disappointing series
It started OK, but soon turned out to be a pile of nonsense. I wish I had waited, giving people the opportunity to write reviews reflecting the vacuity of the production.I gave it the benefit of the doubt in spite of the poster that looked like the one of the "Squid Game" (another pile of nonsense). There are too many impossible elements (e.g., guess who is among the hostages? guess the fooling strategy to get out by digging a tunnel [how many YEARS would that take? and with which equipment?] several characters changing during the episodes! useless stuff on which the hostages try to capitalize ...).
The acting is nothing special, and the subplots outside of the heist place don't add anything to the episodes.
I am actually too polite to state outright what I think.
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Mixed emotions on this one
I had high expectations but the length (at least 1/3 too much) and the biological/physical nonsense heavily damaged watching this series.I liked the idea of discussing the future of water, which covers most of the world today, makes up most of the human body, and was even understood as a principle in the formation of the universe in early Greek philosophy, and is threatened by human activities. I liked the experiment on the goldfish. I liked the clashes of interests regarding the mission on the Moon.
In my eyes, showing how lunar water had been identified, then mined, leading to the establishment of the base, would have improved the production.
The problems now.
The plot is meaningless as - even accepting the biological impossibilities presented - the company interested in putting its paws on the resources in the base could have just sent its own craft and crew. There was no need to infiltrate the space agency mission.
The plot is - separately - meaningless because of the many impossibilities presented:
1. One can't see a virus using the microscope used,
2. and can't even see a bacterium unless one prepares the bacterium by first staining it.
3. Genetic modifications in one biosystem cannot become antibodies in another one.
4. The girl would have died of starvation,
5. and if she had exited the base, would have immediately frozen to death and be without breath.
6. Water cannot replicate as reported.
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The writer(s) should have consulted KAIST and/or some other group/institute to mitigate the nonsense in the series. Bae Doona could have done chromatography on the water, investigated the plants, worked under hoods, irradiated/autoclaved stuff, and she would have realized if liquid water exists inside the base, parts thereof would exist as water vapor and thus cause the same effects as the liquid, ...
Now "The Silent Sea" will negatively affect me watching "Stranger 3" (if it comes out), since Bae Doona would have the leading female role (like in "Stranger" and "Stranger 2").
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Messy and disappointing
Perhaps I am in the wrong age/ mental group. I found this stuff messy and meaningless, more or less centered (since it's neither) about who deserves to be killed (based on what?).The series jumps from one killing attempt to the next, akin to what happens in many videogames, a point of which people are reminded in the end when the screen goes "thanks for playing". As such it shares much with "Squid game", which I found to be trash.
I expected more from Lee Young-Ae, here juggling videogames, booze, junk food, and occasional work.
Some acting was OK. The best element of the series is the music; some cartoons on which the series is based, are also OK.
I am afraid that tossing the serial killer in jail (could have shown the trial!), who hears a jail mate screaming that some guy deserves to die (as if she needs that to lust after killing!), is a preamble for a second series whereby the nutcase escapes for a new killing spree. May God have mercy on us, and block "Inspector Koo 2".
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Another great series in 2021
2021 has been great in terms of Korean productions as exemplified by "Sweet & Sour" and "Move to Heaven". "Hellbound" is a series for everyone, but not everyone will appreciate it.The title and the reactions in the series to a repeated supernatural phenomenon, gives the viewers an insight into mass psyche in front of God/the transcendent.
Then, in the middle of the series one person makes a smart remark that goes against mainstream: in reality we are facing an unexplained set of phenomena and some people are exploiting these phenomena.
The author and/or movie maker will make everything crystal clear in the last seconds of the last episode, and I won't spoil it.
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Could have been better
It's nice to see high-schoolers trying to figure out what to do with their life, and anchor the whole in real facts (Asian financial crisis of 1997, then to a minor extent the Sept. 2001 terrorist attacks), but looking a few below the surface, the series unravels, leaving much nonsense.The series is full of monoparental families, or where parents are absent, and as such can't help their kids, which is seriously odd in Korea today. Extremely odd is the daughter of HeeDo who makes 0 reference to her father (she was somehow born! even if sperm donation was performed).
The whole spiel about fencing looks abnormal. Geographically, the high-school supplying half of the female national competitors and the national training center make no sense. Linguistically, the French sucks big time (school in "France", commands during Korean training, and at international events, ... the whole thing); the producers could have recorded a complete set of orders and then used it ad hoc throughout the series.
In the end, I am left with the feeling that the author didn't really know what to do, and thus took a bit of this (choose a sport, fencing), and that (some pseudo-rivalry among leads, a point in time for the main story and another for the results of the story), and then see what happens.
What happened is not much.
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Watch first 2 and last 2 episodes, skip the rest
Some supernatural thingy called Bulgasal has been affecting Korea for 1,000 years. Its identity and the genesis of Bulgasal is shown at the very end after the series goes for a reiteration of failed attempts involving the three leading roles to sort out what's going on. It's boring beyond belief, but at the time was the only new Korean stuff on netflix (Bulgasal enticed me to check out shows from other countries, and I found decent movies/series from the Hispanophone world, e.g. Toc toc, Tell me when, Outlaws, So much love to give, ...).A lot of the stuff in Bulgasal actually makes no sense.
The writer and producer (and whoever approved and financed the project) should have made a 4-episode mini-series, paying close attention to stuff making sense, and highlighting the scenes in ancient Korea (the costumes are well made and very different from the standard Joseon stuff).
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Special
A movie starting as a comedy with many sweet points (e.g. nurse kissing the bag of saline fluid and telling the patient that it is a special treatment for his faster recovery), with the right cast (don't only look at the leads, the mom and dad and the hospital room mates, and the head nurse, ... just great), turns into a tragedy as everything is collapsing.Or so it seems.
The movie maker had fooled us all along!
You have to watch it again to look at the details: when the ring went missing, when this and that.
A masterpiece, including the very matching musing to the moment when the mask fell and the truth became revealed.
One question, which I don't see people asking, and my answer is a nay: did she get the abortion? I think she got to keep the child, and the folks who give poor ratings to this movie completely missed the personality of the nurse.
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So what?
Standard someone gets whacked: who did it and why?Standard rich family and internal mess.
To differentiate itself from being a boring rehash of similar situations, the series banked on weird things. Thus, the rich family is made mostly of incompetent (how could it have made it big?). The homes are huge and uncomfortable. The people have weird relationships: wife can't like hubby, who anyway sleeps around elsewhere, and is totally unaware of the wife [why did he marry her?], son fools around with maids, other guy is a control freak, matriarch likes birds, the nun is an ex-gisaeng, who in the end leaves her vocation, head of maids is another "masterpiece", etc. This mess remains a mess throughout the whole series.
In the end you get to see why the guy got wacked, how, and by whom, and then you ask yourself: so what?
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It's OK - or not - to be all over the place
Park JinJoo's character made an ominous statement: "a developmentally challenged illustrator working with an emotionally challenged writer will either be a huge success or a colossal fiasco".The latter turned out to materialize.
The plot is a mess, and I highly praise the actors for being able to survive it.
Personally I hated the clothing of the FL, though I understand that other people may have loved it (apparently it's expen$ive stuff).
Not everything is a disaster, though. Here and there the author shows that she can - perhaps if she wants and/or perhaps with more experience - do good stuff. For instance, in the early episodes there were some interesting events, like the woman wanting the guy and thinking she is holding him in her hand. It was very well done.
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A really mixed bag
Neither the title referring to the green jackets worn when volunteering for the school, nor the poster showing a group of 5 women around age 40, reflect the series, which is more of a thing developing as it goes. Per se that is not bad as life is like that.These are imperfect people, with very few characters emerging from the mess, ... again mimicking life.
We get to see rich people, middle class folks, people with debts in terms of money, earlier experiences and other forms of debt. Again, such is life.
The "sin" of the writer is that she could have done a better job at directing the viewers (e.g., all the stuff about the education of the kids is just abandoned somewhere in the middle of the series), which as per some comments, felt that they had seen different genres, different series all blended. Failure to do so renders the job of the writer redundant. Personally I have a huge problem with the coincidence of having so many people presented as neighbors and sharing a past.
Kudos regarding one detail: the step brother and sister adopted in France came respectively from Korea and China, and that is exactly what happens in the world of adoptions: Korea tended to allow for the foreign adoption of boys, while China tended to allow for the foreign adoption of girls. The French used by both is however really disgusting and cannot reflect the respective adoptions.
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Same stuff as time travel
People moving from one body into another is just like people going back and forth in time, making a mess of who is who and the relatives. Some people enjoy it.The development of the plot was confusing and slow, filled with meetings across 20 episodes, making it look like a play from Ancient Greece. The participants at these meetings kept rambling about the power structure in the Joseon-lookalike kingdom and an "ice stone". What was extremely unclear was the basis for what was legit and what wasn't in this magical world.
One thig was extremely clear: everything was fake as fake can be.
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Should have skipped the whole thing
Let's start with what's positive about this series: the individual stories of some of the desperate folks, who end up in the slaughterhouse (e.g. the North Korean defector, the woman ready to to anything to survive, the girl giving up her life hoping to contribute to save someone else, ...).The rest is utter trash. I was fooled by the trailer. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
I hope there is no series 2 (not for me, since I won't watch it anyway, but for the poor souls, who might).
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Just like the US POTUS with the same name: no good
From the beginning to the end Carter is on a killing spree in order to ensure an impossible cure for a virus, which at first hit North Korea. The cure is impossible because you can't develop a vaccine from the blood of one survivor (it only works in Hollywood), and the virus makes no sense either in terms of contamination, incubation, symptoms, recovery, etc.The pseudo-plot relies on murdering 300-400 people (I lost count) along the way, and in the end turns out that everything was done for naught. Yet, digging a little (femtometers will suffice) under the surface of the movie, the whole thing could have ended at the beginning or at any point in the movie: the threesome Carter, a "scientist" (the actor who was great in "The plan man", and should have avoided being associated with this trash), and the latter's daughter, was needed for the killing to go on.
Pure nonsense, just like the US president with the same name.
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Solid. Try to watch it on a binge.
Interesting short series. It could have dragged on with fillers (e.g. more about the budding love story, more about the past of the dad, more about stuff in the high-school, more about this and that), but the author and/or movie maker decided for the more compact version.Some stuff is predictable (e.g. who killed the dad), though one must wait a sec to find out the motive behind.
Gladly, I didn't see much product placements. I am sure that people better versed than me in that field would have noticed more than the few cars, and other items, which I noticed.
Last but not least: for several episodes one is left wondering what the title means until ... (won't spoil it).
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This review may contain spoilers
Unnecessarly complicated (though the Sisyphus title was a "buyer beware" sign)
How do you stop a war started by a rabid person who hates everyone and everything, and is able to surround himself by brainless minions?Or rather WHO is stopping the war as we have a mess of present-people and future-people at the same time?
In the double end, the lovey-dovey couple is united (nice guy from present and nice girl from future presumably downloaded via the downloader made before the uploader, and thus still existing), and the super bastard appears nicer, but still envious of the nice guy and with two super messy sheets of arrows, name etc. just in case he may try again to screw up the world (not sure who could make sense of the scribble, and entities no longer existing, though).
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