Efrain Jorge
Spain
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A perfect Work condemned by its Ending.
This comment is going to be full of spoilers, so people who haven't seen the drama are better off not reading it until after watching. Mr. Queen is one of the best Korean dramas I have seen in my life (and I have already seen dozens) and one of the two or three that have involved me the most emotionally.There are no words to describe how wonderful and excellent this story is. It is a series that makes you laugh, excites you, keeps you interested at all times, and deeply moves you. The writing is perfect for most of the plot (I'll talk about that later), the direction is ideal, the production is impeccable. The work of all the actors in the cast is sublime, unsurpassed. Especially extraordinary is the work of the actress Shin Hye-sun as the female lead, she plays Queen Cheorin in an impressive way, achieving through body and verbal language to split into two different people depending on if the soul of Jang Bong- hwan is inside of Cheorin's body, or not. She deserves all the awards for that amazing work.
The overall plot is incredibly intense and gripping, with that mix of real Korean history, and fiction, combining romance, fantasy, drama, comedy, action, and suspense. But without a doubt, the fundamental factor is related to that experience of the soul of chef Jang Bong-hwan within the body of Queen Cheorin, the comedy of that situation and her passionate and morbid romance with Cheoljong. The whole story is based on that funny, crazy and horny love between a man and the soul of another man inside the body of a woman. Curiously, it is one of the best Korean drama couples I have seen, with chemistry so hot that it melts the Sun. Throughout the series, this couple's romance evolves from more comical to more lovely, dramatic and moving. But precisely there is the big problem of this drama.
The series is perfect, worthy of a 10 rating ... until we hit the 18th minute of the last episode. In that minute when the writers made Jang Bong-hwan leave Cheorin's body forever and wake up in his own body, the end of the story was ruined for me. The creative decision to kill So Bong (the being formed by Cheorin's body and Jang Bong-hwan's soul mixed with Kim So-yong's memories) and to make the original soul of Kim So-yong, in the end, left next to Cheoljong was a disaster.
The next 48 minutes of the final episode were a contradictory, absurd, and irritating attempt to make the real Kim So-yong the female lead and minimize So Bong/Jang Bong-hwan to a mediocre and irrelevant role. I'm sorry, but they didn't convince me. For me, the real female lead was So Bong, not Kim So-yong (whom I even consider boring). Throughout the whole story, it was evident that Cheoljong fell in love with So Bong (of the soul of Jang Bong-hwan) and in the last minutes, they try to convince us that he is in love with Kim So-yong, and apparently that even he does not notice the change of personality. Worse still is the ambiguity-induced theory at the end, that Jang Bong-hwan was always a puppet of Kim So-yong, something that would degrade Jang Bong-hwan's role and his feelings for Cheoljong, a theory that I don't believe nor support.
Jang Bong-hwan had the worst possible ending, returning to his current life to live alone, without all the people he loved. And after falling in love with a man and even having sex with him, how could he go back to living as a heterosexual man? I think that would be traumatic for him. With the memories of his life as Queen Cheorin, could one day go back to being 'normal' and forget about his love for Cheoljong to fall in love with a woman?... How can he bear the fact that he is no longer pregnant with the child he has learned to love? The fact that he is not depicted as very traumatized and tormented is another stupid mistake by the writers. And as for Cheoljong, he fell in love with Jang Bong-hwan's soul, not So-yong's soul, so in the end, he didn't stay with the woman he loved, but with a very different one. How long would it take for him to realize that she is not the same person that he fell in love with? Seeing that she is no longer the crazy, reckless, bad-tempered, rude-mannered, eccentric or weird woman who conquered his heart.
It was the worst way to ruin a story at the end, and I don't understand how they can say it's a happy ending. I think they should have at least made an alternate ending to have the right and fair ending with the Cheoljong and So Bong couple, but they left us with only that disappointing and implausible ending. For me, those last 48 minutes deserve a rating of 3, however, I prefer to stay with the memories of the previous 19 episodes (and the first 18 minutes of that final episode) and for the joy and passion they generated in me, I give it a rating of 9.5 for the series overall, and it will always have a place in my heart as one of the series that has most brightened my life.
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Duty After School: Part 2
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The airs of grandeur that ruined story
This is the best example of how a pretentious writer can ruin his own story, by wanting to do a more 'intellectual' work.I would summarize the problems of this second part in three causes: wanting to make the story darker, the claims to make it more philosophical and transcendent, and wanting to emphasize social criticism a lot.
Regarding the first, it is obvious that the writer wanted to make the story much darker than in the first part, and for this he wanted to resort to all means, even playing the sexual violence card, as occurred in the plot of the prison and in Young Soo's attempted sexual assault on his female comrade in arms. Making a dark story is something that I usually like, but it is necessary to do it with creativity, good taste, and a sense of timing, so that it does not undermine the fundamental purpose of the plot, and here those conditions were not met.
The second was made clear by emphasizing the message that human beings are worse than any alien monster, that there is no worse predator for human beings than human beings themselves. An otherwise irrelevant message, because all adult and moderately intelligent human beings know that sad reality, and if not, there are all the series and movies about zombies to remember it.
And the third is obvious when highlighting the criticism against the South Korean education system and the excessive social pressure on adolescents to succeed in such a demanding and relentless system, and also the criticism against social inequality that multiplies the pressure on someone who comes from a poor family and seeks an escape from poverty in the educational system.
The problem is that by wanting to make those three objectives the main motivation of the second part, the writer forgot that this was basically a fun and exciting science fiction story about an alien invasion and a group of high school teenagers turned, despite themselves, warriors. Everything exciting and interesting from the first part went to waste in the last two episodes, especially the last one, and we were left with a story with airs of greatness that we didn't ask for and that we didn't like.
It's a pity because I liked the first part a lot, and I would give it (in general) a rating of 8 out of 10. Even to the first episode of the second part I would give a rating of 7, and until the penultimate episode I wanted to be lenient, and even the prison plot didn't seem bad at all, although I didn't like the ending very much.
But the last episode ruined everything, I found it to be the worst final episode out of all the hundreds of Korean dramas I've watched. After most of our teenagers managed to survive hard, seeing almost every character we empathize with getting killed by a fellow idiot who suddenly went berserk is so disappointing. Obviously, I would have preferred most of them to have survived the war, but if they had to die, I would have preferred to see them die in battle against the alien monsters, and not killed by surprise by a deranged comrade, something that was done just to send a pretentious message and supposedly transcendent.
I don't want to value the scene of the massacre too much (because it still annoys me) but just to say that after so many battles as veteran soldiers I am surprised that there were not several of them who had the reflexes to quickly repel the attack with their weapons, it seems hardly credible.
After that disastrous ending, having a pre-graduation scene (flashback or alternate fantasy?) thrown in the last few minutes and then a disconcerting post-credits music scene, makes the final episode even worse.
In conclusion, the final episode has been a fiasco, which only deserves a rating of 1 (and that's because the amusement park scenes gave us a little joy). I agree with all the critics, this second part is an annoying waste that ruined a pretty good story in the first part.
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When saving drama is harder than saving the world.
I don't know why but before watching the drama I had a feeling that I wouldn't like it very much, and although I tried to watch it without prejudice, my suspicions were confirmed. I really like Park Shin Hye, she is one of my favorite South Korean actresses, and I adore all her work, in general, but without a doubt of all the series where she has worked and that I have seen, this is the worst. One problem is the story: a story that is not very original, in terms of the theme of the time travel of a warrior from the future to change the past and thus avoid a war that will turn the future (the present of that female warrior) into an apocalyptic hell ... If we change the sex of the warrior, does anyone know "Terminator"? Being a recurring theme, at least it had to be a very interesting and exciting story, and it honestly wasn't. It's not necessarily a bad story, but it's not interesting and gripping enough either, it doesn't really get hooked. And in the end, it gets kind of boring, with a loop that pretends to be exciting and becomes irritating.From the point of view of the realism and the coherence of the science fiction of the story, everything was handled pretty badly and it doesn't really work if we did use a bit of logic. There are many contradictions, gaps, and unanswered questions in that chaos of changes in the past and the changes that are supposed to cause in the future (and therefore in the present). An example is a scene near the end of the last episode, in which a last-minute villain threatens the male lead with murdering the female lead in front of his eyes if he does not finish the process of creating the time machine. But at that point in the story, he could save her simply by standing idly by, refusing to finish the creation of the machine, since then it is assumed that there would have been no time travels, and thus she would have stayed safe in the future. In that case, she simply would never have been there to be shot. However, incomprehensibly the male lead gives in to blackmail in principle ... absurd things that deprive of credibility the premises of the plot.
Another big problem is the character of the male protagonist, a hateful and tedious character, without charisma, boring and unfriendly, who only manages to annoy or produce apathy. It's probably not the actor's fault, at least not totally (although maybe another actor would have worked better), but the writing. And along with this is the problem of the utter lack of chemistry between Park Shin Hye's character and the male lead character. He is undoubtedly her worst co-star in all dramas. Such a bad lead couple, I really preferred her to be alone or with almost any other man. Therefore the romance did not work out here.
What partially saves the drama is the part of the action scenes, if it weren't for the action the story would be a disaster. And the excellent work of Park Shin Hye, her great performance of a warrior from the apocalyptic future, at the same time with a funny and sweet touch (as the girl who could not live her adolescence normally due to the apocalypse and therefore is still partly an innocent female teenager despite being a killing machine). In addition to her, the actor who played her father did a great work (the chemistry between father and daughter was better than hers with her romantic interest) and there were also other characters that were funny or charismatic like the mobster who owns the store that went from being an antagonist to an ally. The villains were mediocre, irritating, and without charisma, particularly the main one of them. Ultimately, if it weren't for the action (particularly Park Shin Hye's action scenes) and a certain touch of comedy (very little) at times, the series would be totally unsuccessful. The ending was disappointing because it was not a conclusive ending, in particular, a story like this should not leave the door open to another season (although highly unlikely) and should have definitively resolved the narrative arc. Final judgment: score of 7 out of 10.
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A very exciting and addictive tragicomic Thriller.
I'm doing this review after I've watched all three seasons of the series, but I'll forget the other two to focus on how I felt watching season 1. Honestly, I think it's one of the most exciting and addictive Korean dramas I've ever seen. The story hooks you almost from the first minute and keeps you desperately impatient to see what happens in the next episode, which is its best virtue. Obviously, it is an ensemble story, where all the characters are very important within the story and almost all the subplots are very interesting. It is a perfect mix of comedy, drama, action, and suspense, an intense, convoluted, and funny tragicomic thriller. The main characters are very charismatic, both the heroes and the villains, especially the three leading women (Shim Su-ryeon, Oh Yoon-hee, and Cheon Seo-jin), and the leading male villain (Joo Dan-tae). The story of the character Min Seol-ah, whose murder is the cause of all the action this season, is quite moving, I empathized with her a lot. The characters of the rich, both the adults and the young, are so despicable that it is impossible not to hate them and want them to suffer the worst revenge (although at least the adults are charismatic and funny). In general, the plot is well constructed, to be exciting and fun, although it is evident that it has a lot of melodrama, in the style of a soap opera (which is normally something negative but here it is forgivable). Although there are little things about the plot that I don't like, watching the entire season is such an enjoyable and exciting experience that in the end, the rating has to be a 10. The ending would be disappointing if it weren't for the fact that it is an open ending to allow a second season. In conclusion, it is a fun story of intrigue and suspense with a good dose of action and drama. The opening credits sequence deserves high praise.Vond je deze recentie nuttig?
