How Not To Stretch Out a 5 Hour Drama
My 4 categories are Acting/Cast, Writing, Direction/SFX/Music, Entertainment Value.
I think this is the worst directing I’ve ever seen regarding pacing and story telling. I’m awestruck.
Acting/Cast: It’s okay. This drama is really slow with a focus on aesthetics. There isn’t much ‘acting’ going on. The female lead is the emotionless, stoic one. The male lead’s character is a little different than what I’ve seen before. He’s super nerdy but also really happy and energetic. It felt forced, though, as if he’s playing it up to lift the moods of those around him. I don’t know if this was the director’s intention or not. Well...maybe it is a problem with his acting. There’s a scene where he gets angry and that felt forced, too. The second male lead is also a stoic character with a small role. The second female lead actually has to do some acting. She does well. Her personality doesn’t feel forced. I like the male lead’s mom played by Jang Hye Jin (장혜진), but she’s not in the drama much. 4.5/10
Writing: The concept of this drama is really interesting. I like the idea of approaching something supernatural with scientific experimentation. However, it takes a bit of time to actually get to that part of the story. Unfortunately, this is the only good aspect of the writing…Let’s start at the beginning...After 3 hours, barely anything has happened. It shouldn’t have taken 3 hours to set up such a simple drama. That’s not the worst part though...every other episode seems to be a replay of the episode before it, but from another character’s perspective...sort of. I say ‘sort of’ because these new perspectives actually don’t add any new information to the story...so what’s the point? The set up takes 3 hours because episode 2 is episode 1 all over again. It’s the strangest shit I’ve seen in a long time. Literally, at least half of this drama is just replaying scenes we’ve already seen and have gotten thorough information from. But that’s not all...It gets even dumber at the end. We spend the entire drama following the male lead around and seeing everything that he’s doing and hearing everything he’s thinking. Then, suddenly at the end, we follow a different character who has no idea what the male lead has been doing. So this character has to do some detective work to figure it out. But the audience already knows everything, so there’s no mystery here for us. We are then made to suffer through a rewatch of the entire drama in flashback fashion as this character is learning everything that we already know. I’m just completely dumbfounded…Also, why was the male lead going back and forth about whether or not the female lead is a witch? That was really confusing. Was he lying to her to encourage her to live her life and not care about who gets hurt? Anyway, the ending is okay. It’s not the worst I’ve seen but it’s definitely not good. There’s not enough relationship development for any of the characters for the ending to be satisfying. It felt like it wasn’t over, as if an episode is missing. Also, I have to talk about the male lead being a stalker. It actually is mentioned in the drama, which surprised me. But, the male lead really is a legit stalker and it’s pretty scary at times. If someone has been a victim of stalking, I would not recommend watching this drama. The male lead can get away with it because he’s doing it to save people who are cursed as well as save the people around them. However, there is still the fact that he’s in love with the female lead to an obsessive point. From what I gather, witches seem to have something mystical about them that draws people to them (they’re basically all Mary Sues). So, guys fall in love with the female lead for no reason and that seems to be the case with the male lead, too. So does he genuinely love her or is he just drawn to her because she’s a witch? His stalking/data collection on her is extremely detailed. Why does he need to record that she takes a break from working and stretches at 2 pm? He has all the books that she’s translated just because she translated them. It’s things that have nothing to do with trying to free her from her curse and it feels like it’s going way too far. 1.5/10
Direction/SFX/Music: The pacing is terrible. The first 3 episodes barely set up the plot. A lot of this drama is just replaying previous scenes without even adding anything important to the plot. I feel like most of the issues with this drama could be fixed by shortening it to 5 or 6 episodes and changing the point-of-view to be strictly from the male lead throughout the entire drama. If we are only able to see things from his perspective, the story would be a much more engaging mystery for the audience. The cinematography style is actually pretty nice. I could tell they were trying to be artsy with this drama. Although I do hate the intro that plays at the beginning of every episode. It was just random scenes from various episodes put together in a montage. It felt low-effort. The OST is nothing special, but the music scores are decent. 1.5/10
Entertainment Value: Despite the very slow start, all of the flashbacks, boring characters, and terrible story telling, I actually enjoyed watching this drama. The mystery aspect was interesting. There was a style change up midway through the drama where it felt more like a suspense/thriller drama. That was cool. I wish they really leaned into that though. 5/10
Overall, I gave this drama a 3/10. Although I liked The Witch a lot more than The Trunk I gave them both the same overall score (both dramas suffer from pacing issues). Even though I wanted to drop it, The Trunk earned a 3 from me for its cast and production value. The Witch, although the execution was terrible, earned a 3 for its interesting premise and entertainment value.
I think this is the worst directing I’ve ever seen regarding pacing and story telling. I’m awestruck.
Acting/Cast: It’s okay. This drama is really slow with a focus on aesthetics. There isn’t much ‘acting’ going on. The female lead is the emotionless, stoic one. The male lead’s character is a little different than what I’ve seen before. He’s super nerdy but also really happy and energetic. It felt forced, though, as if he’s playing it up to lift the moods of those around him. I don’t know if this was the director’s intention or not. Well...maybe it is a problem with his acting. There’s a scene where he gets angry and that felt forced, too. The second male lead is also a stoic character with a small role. The second female lead actually has to do some acting. She does well. Her personality doesn’t feel forced. I like the male lead’s mom played by Jang Hye Jin (장혜진), but she’s not in the drama much. 4.5/10
Writing: The concept of this drama is really interesting. I like the idea of approaching something supernatural with scientific experimentation. However, it takes a bit of time to actually get to that part of the story. Unfortunately, this is the only good aspect of the writing…Let’s start at the beginning...After 3 hours, barely anything has happened. It shouldn’t have taken 3 hours to set up such a simple drama. That’s not the worst part though...every other episode seems to be a replay of the episode before it, but from another character’s perspective...sort of. I say ‘sort of’ because these new perspectives actually don’t add any new information to the story...so what’s the point? The set up takes 3 hours because episode 2 is episode 1 all over again. It’s the strangest shit I’ve seen in a long time. Literally, at least half of this drama is just replaying scenes we’ve already seen and have gotten thorough information from. But that’s not all...It gets even dumber at the end. We spend the entire drama following the male lead around and seeing everything that he’s doing and hearing everything he’s thinking. Then, suddenly at the end, we follow a different character who has no idea what the male lead has been doing. So this character has to do some detective work to figure it out. But the audience already knows everything, so there’s no mystery here for us. We are then made to suffer through a rewatch of the entire drama in flashback fashion as this character is learning everything that we already know. I’m just completely dumbfounded…Also, why was the male lead going back and forth about whether or not the female lead is a witch? That was really confusing. Was he lying to her to encourage her to live her life and not care about who gets hurt? Anyway, the ending is okay. It’s not the worst I’ve seen but it’s definitely not good. There’s not enough relationship development for any of the characters for the ending to be satisfying. It felt like it wasn’t over, as if an episode is missing. Also, I have to talk about the male lead being a stalker. It actually is mentioned in the drama, which surprised me. But, the male lead really is a legit stalker and it’s pretty scary at times. If someone has been a victim of stalking, I would not recommend watching this drama. The male lead can get away with it because he’s doing it to save people who are cursed as well as save the people around them. However, there is still the fact that he’s in love with the female lead to an obsessive point. From what I gather, witches seem to have something mystical about them that draws people to them (they’re basically all Mary Sues). So, guys fall in love with the female lead for no reason and that seems to be the case with the male lead, too. So does he genuinely love her or is he just drawn to her because she’s a witch? His stalking/data collection on her is extremely detailed. Why does he need to record that she takes a break from working and stretches at 2 pm? He has all the books that she’s translated just because she translated them. It’s things that have nothing to do with trying to free her from her curse and it feels like it’s going way too far. 1.5/10
Direction/SFX/Music: The pacing is terrible. The first 3 episodes barely set up the plot. A lot of this drama is just replaying previous scenes without even adding anything important to the plot. I feel like most of the issues with this drama could be fixed by shortening it to 5 or 6 episodes and changing the point-of-view to be strictly from the male lead throughout the entire drama. If we are only able to see things from his perspective, the story would be a much more engaging mystery for the audience. The cinematography style is actually pretty nice. I could tell they were trying to be artsy with this drama. Although I do hate the intro that plays at the beginning of every episode. It was just random scenes from various episodes put together in a montage. It felt low-effort. The OST is nothing special, but the music scores are decent. 1.5/10
Entertainment Value: Despite the very slow start, all of the flashbacks, boring characters, and terrible story telling, I actually enjoyed watching this drama. The mystery aspect was interesting. There was a style change up midway through the drama where it felt more like a suspense/thriller drama. That was cool. I wish they really leaned into that though. 5/10
Overall, I gave this drama a 3/10. Although I liked The Witch a lot more than The Trunk I gave them both the same overall score (both dramas suffer from pacing issues). Even though I wanted to drop it, The Trunk earned a 3 from me for its cast and production value. The Witch, although the execution was terrible, earned a 3 for its interesting premise and entertainment value.
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