I don’t know why but I started to hate JCW after I was fond of him. Perhaps because he's wasting his potential…
Comments like these are YIKES. As far as I can tell he's doing a good job with the role he was GIVEN. I don't think you can really blame an actor for the writing and direction the drama is taking....
Kim Eun Sook's construction of the plot has seemed terribly forced and recycled. It plays on screen as if she had a deadline to meet putting out scripts and had writer's block throughout the whole process, which is a shame because I think I read her per episode salary is the highest in Korean history. One of the best attributes of kdramas is the slow burn of the OTP falling in love, but here we have the ML already in love within the first few minutes of the drama...because a picture. The dialogue is canned and the intended humor has fallen flat. All the "he's so handsome" exclamations about the King from extras in the first few episodes is cringey and hamfisted. All the mathematical 1/0 stuff from the King is cheesy and sticks out like a sore thumb.
There's something incredibly inorganic about the drama, as if it was simply made to make money as opposed to telling a great story: counting the Chinese money due to Lee Min Ho, counting on the ratings due to Kim Eun Sook, Lee Min Ho and Kim Go Eun's status, utilizing PPL as early and often as possible (literally a minute ad for BBQ chicken and their yangneom sauce). Also, I'm not sure how it was budgeted but they probably should have opened their wallets more for the CGI. It's laughably bad. The CGI of the door in between worlds looks like it belonged in 1996, not to mention that purgatory space.
If a drama is an official remake of a parent story, there will always be a comparison. You can decide to not compare…
I kind of disagree with it maybe being better off being a stand-alone story. While I agree that adaptations should keep the ‘essence’ of the source material, I think that the writers of the remake should be free to make their own liberations on their take of the story. Whether that’d be to make improvements on the storytelling or direct it to a different audience, making these changes are what make this remake, to me, much more enjoyable than the original. A current day example of this done well is Avengers Age of Ultron. The story in the movie is quite different from the source material but Marvel adapted what they could and altered the rest to make it fit in their isolated MCU universe (Tony Stark created Ultron in the movie, in the comics Ant-Man creates Ultron). It worked for that context and most people loved the movie. In the case of this remake, for the most part they are following the J-version's story beats and the drama does still keep that creepy vibe that I felt from the original (albeit toned down), but the writing and even the acting are superior to the original. Of course, I’m starting to compare both and you have to take into consideration the different cultures, time periods, production qualities and such. But putting that aside, this remake’s writing and acting together make me feel much more emotion than the original. The motivations of the characters seem much more drawn out (original’s was so restless, where sometimes their reasoning for their actions would come out of nowhere). Here, you see the main female struggle with her emotions rather than being frantically drawn to the main lead’s ‘mysteriousness’. The acting here just gives this version a little more ‘warmth’ than the J-version which feels anemic in comparison (maybe that was what they were going for). Anyways, that’s my hot-take for now as of ep 9, which btw the last scene of that ep made me feel for the main lead. Overall I think it’s a nice contrast to the J-version and I’m looking forward to the next episodes.
There's something incredibly inorganic about the drama, as if it was simply made to make money as opposed to telling a great story: counting the Chinese money due to Lee Min Ho, counting on the ratings due to Kim Eun Sook, Lee Min Ho and Kim Go Eun's status, utilizing PPL as early and often as possible (literally a minute ad for BBQ chicken and their yangneom sauce). Also, I'm not sure how it was budgeted but they probably should have opened their wallets more for the CGI. It's laughably bad. The CGI of the door in between worlds looks like it belonged in 1996, not to mention that purgatory space.
In the case of this remake, for the most part they are following the J-version's story beats and the drama does still keep that creepy vibe that I felt from the original (albeit toned down), but the writing and even the acting are superior to the original. Of course, I’m starting to compare both and you have to take into consideration the different cultures, time periods, production qualities and such. But putting that aside, this remake’s writing and acting together make me feel much more emotion than the original. The motivations of the characters seem much more drawn out (original’s was so restless, where sometimes their reasoning for their actions would come out of nowhere). Here, you see the main female struggle with her emotions rather than being frantically drawn to the main lead’s ‘mysteriousness’. The acting here just gives this version a little more ‘warmth’ than the J-version which feels anemic in comparison (maybe that was what they were going for).
Anyways, that’s my hot-take for now as of ep 9, which btw the last scene of that ep made me feel for the main lead. Overall I think it’s a nice contrast to the J-version and I’m looking forward to the next episodes.