Movie that scretches into a drama with complexity mistaken for depth
The drama is directed by a movie director who is directing his first drama and it is telling.
The whole drama is excruciating slow, with incessant repeated scenes and multiple flashbacks and backstories. It is filmed in a movie style, and not in a good way.
Although that adds to the good camerawork and cinematography, the way the drama is structured makes the movie styles intense moments unexciting because the story is told backwards and we already can antixpant the ending.
The worst is that to the middle of the show, we already are shown the end, but it took two whole episodes just to deliberately show flashback dialogues from three different character perspectives or imagined scenarios just to keep the audience in suspense.
The saving grace is the acting of the cast, but everything else falls apart.
The drama tries to portray Samsik as a political genius and power broker, but the script decides when he is able to pull things off - when the script decides he cannot, he is powerless. When the script decides he is able, he pulls off a political masterpiece.
There are so many glaring plot holes to the point that Samsik ends up being very incoherent. He anticipates at least 3 steps ahead of his enemies, yet falls into all of them. He was able to anticipate the coup failing, but did nothing - he had Hanmin and his troops at disposal to stop general Jang, and Kim San and general Choi were offered US troops if they needed to quell the coup. His end feels like one determined by the writer, so that there can be some sort of sacrifice, or sort of to illustrate the helplessness in that period where Kore is turbulent.
It should have been a movie instead of a drama, and it could have been done with 8-10 episodes. There are way too much repeated and unnecessary scenes - there is even a few seconds of just soldiers standing outside a bunker, which is repeated every time the bunker flashback airs, so scenes just showing characters doing a slow walk into a building.
Backstories which aim to show the character arc are also way too many and repetive - all the characters have bad childhoods. Even support characters who do not add depth or meaning have backstories. They even showed the same school girl chanting a demonstration twice.
Complexity does not mean depth. Backward storytelling only works if it creates suspense and anticipating. It does not work if it creates confusion, and falls flat when it reveals too much to point we know who dies and who does not.
Uncle Samsik really does sound like a show where the characters have all the pieces necessary to solve the plot, but the writer keeps putting the pieces back in the box whenever they’re about to succeed.
It is overall a painful watch for me. I finished it with the help of a lot of fast forwarding just so to know the ending.
The whole drama is excruciating slow, with incessant repeated scenes and multiple flashbacks and backstories. It is filmed in a movie style, and not in a good way.
Although that adds to the good camerawork and cinematography, the way the drama is structured makes the movie styles intense moments unexciting because the story is told backwards and we already can antixpant the ending.
The worst is that to the middle of the show, we already are shown the end, but it took two whole episodes just to deliberately show flashback dialogues from three different character perspectives or imagined scenarios just to keep the audience in suspense.
The saving grace is the acting of the cast, but everything else falls apart.
The drama tries to portray Samsik as a political genius and power broker, but the script decides when he is able to pull things off - when the script decides he cannot, he is powerless. When the script decides he is able, he pulls off a political masterpiece.
There are so many glaring plot holes to the point that Samsik ends up being very incoherent. He anticipates at least 3 steps ahead of his enemies, yet falls into all of them. He was able to anticipate the coup failing, but did nothing - he had Hanmin and his troops at disposal to stop general Jang, and Kim San and general Choi were offered US troops if they needed to quell the coup. His end feels like one determined by the writer, so that there can be some sort of sacrifice, or sort of to illustrate the helplessness in that period where Kore is turbulent.
It should have been a movie instead of a drama, and it could have been done with 8-10 episodes. There are way too much repeated and unnecessary scenes - there is even a few seconds of just soldiers standing outside a bunker, which is repeated every time the bunker flashback airs, so scenes just showing characters doing a slow walk into a building.
Backstories which aim to show the character arc are also way too many and repetive - all the characters have bad childhoods. Even support characters who do not add depth or meaning have backstories. They even showed the same school girl chanting a demonstration twice.
Complexity does not mean depth. Backward storytelling only works if it creates suspense and anticipating. It does not work if it creates confusion, and falls flat when it reveals too much to point we know who dies and who does not.
Uncle Samsik really does sound like a show where the characters have all the pieces necessary to solve the plot, but the writer keeps putting the pieces back in the box whenever they’re about to succeed.
It is overall a painful watch for me. I finished it with the help of a lot of fast forwarding just so to know the ending.
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