3
4
1
The dialogue is good the plot is a mess.
My response to this drama is quite mixed. The last 10 episodes were engaging and the dialogue and voice overs were good and thoughtful in a philosophic sort of way, but the rest of it had some serious problems.
One of them seemed to be an identity crisis. It was seeking justice but was not a legal drama, seeking revenge but lacked the requisite bitterness, it had hints of magic but was not a fantasy. Now I’m not averse to a non-genre specific drama, but, the reason that the legal framework and the bitterness and the flights of imagination are there in the first place is to add structure, interest and most importantly, tension to a story. If you do away with them, you need to replace them with something else. And here, for me, that just didn’t happen. One genre it did get right however, was the love story. Not a steamy, hot passionate love story, but a beautifully tender and caring one. However, as this is not a full on romance, you cannot ask it to carry the whole thing.
Let’s start with the plot. The flow of the drama was off. A good plot leads you by the hand on a path where the next step clicks into the past step, and significant characters are enmeshed from early on. But here the plot was erratic and was not helped by the disjointed editing. New characters were introduced and not firmly bound into the ongoing narrative. Things moved forward in a scrappy way and there seemed to be no driving central motivation that you could hang onto.
There was an emphasis on the wrong things. Important plot developments were not exploited but casually introduced as a throw away line in a conversation. Major events to featured characters were almost skipped over, as though they were less important minor characters. Dramatic scenes that were central, were presented with little tension building beforehand so landed with no real impact. I’m particularly thinking about Eps 26 - 28, where far too much was happening that distracted from landing the key scene.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t survive on character names alone. Even in western dramas where names are familiar, I can’t remember a character simply by their name, but need an indication or reminder of how they fit into the story. Well the first 5 episodes in particular were awash with names and I just had to let them flow by and hope to keep up. Also, the opposing factions had little to distinguish them in any way, with fairly nondescript characters which made it hard to remember who they were or where they fitted.
Talking of characters, Bai Lu was best in the early episodes but Ryan Cheng shone in the later ones. As this is a C-drama, half the praise needs to go to the voice actors. I’m not sure if the two leads had voice actors, but whoever spoke the lines in Eps 31-34, truly deserves the plaudits. The scenes on Li Mountain were genuinely moving and the best of the whole drama. The Empress had depth written into her part and was well played by Dong Jie. But the parts of Prince Li (Cai Zheng Jie) and his wife (Yang Shu Yi) were unconvincing. They felt shallow and cliche in a production that managed in general to have a bit more subtlety. It was almost as though their parts were written by someone else.
To finish with the positives, I really loved the sense of ordinariness that the slow pace, simple dialogue and understated acting created. Although very different in character, it reminded me of Ming Lan. The muted, natural colours and lighting help create believability. The sound track used the zither to great effect and overall the production values were very good. Aside that is from the person who got carried away with the mist generating machine on Li Mountain.
Overall, the dialogue was very well done and I suspect that a lot of it was lifted from the novel. There was a deliberate use of Chinese philosophical writings which added nuance to the characterisation and story.
A bit hard to rate as a 6.5 feels unfair to the overall nuance, but there was so much meh, so I think it will have to be 7.5.
One of them seemed to be an identity crisis. It was seeking justice but was not a legal drama, seeking revenge but lacked the requisite bitterness, it had hints of magic but was not a fantasy. Now I’m not averse to a non-genre specific drama, but, the reason that the legal framework and the bitterness and the flights of imagination are there in the first place is to add structure, interest and most importantly, tension to a story. If you do away with them, you need to replace them with something else. And here, for me, that just didn’t happen. One genre it did get right however, was the love story. Not a steamy, hot passionate love story, but a beautifully tender and caring one. However, as this is not a full on romance, you cannot ask it to carry the whole thing.
Let’s start with the plot. The flow of the drama was off. A good plot leads you by the hand on a path where the next step clicks into the past step, and significant characters are enmeshed from early on. But here the plot was erratic and was not helped by the disjointed editing. New characters were introduced and not firmly bound into the ongoing narrative. Things moved forward in a scrappy way and there seemed to be no driving central motivation that you could hang onto.
There was an emphasis on the wrong things. Important plot developments were not exploited but casually introduced as a throw away line in a conversation. Major events to featured characters were almost skipped over, as though they were less important minor characters. Dramatic scenes that were central, were presented with little tension building beforehand so landed with no real impact. I’m particularly thinking about Eps 26 - 28, where far too much was happening that distracted from landing the key scene.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t survive on character names alone. Even in western dramas where names are familiar, I can’t remember a character simply by their name, but need an indication or reminder of how they fit into the story. Well the first 5 episodes in particular were awash with names and I just had to let them flow by and hope to keep up. Also, the opposing factions had little to distinguish them in any way, with fairly nondescript characters which made it hard to remember who they were or where they fitted.
Talking of characters, Bai Lu was best in the early episodes but Ryan Cheng shone in the later ones. As this is a C-drama, half the praise needs to go to the voice actors. I’m not sure if the two leads had voice actors, but whoever spoke the lines in Eps 31-34, truly deserves the plaudits. The scenes on Li Mountain were genuinely moving and the best of the whole drama. The Empress had depth written into her part and was well played by Dong Jie. But the parts of Prince Li (Cai Zheng Jie) and his wife (Yang Shu Yi) were unconvincing. They felt shallow and cliche in a production that managed in general to have a bit more subtlety. It was almost as though their parts were written by someone else.
To finish with the positives, I really loved the sense of ordinariness that the slow pace, simple dialogue and understated acting created. Although very different in character, it reminded me of Ming Lan. The muted, natural colours and lighting help create believability. The sound track used the zither to great effect and overall the production values were very good. Aside that is from the person who got carried away with the mist generating machine on Li Mountain.
Overall, the dialogue was very well done and I suspect that a lot of it was lifted from the novel. There was a deliberate use of Chinese philosophical writings which added nuance to the characterisation and story.
A bit hard to rate as a 6.5 feels unfair to the overall nuance, but there was so much meh, so I think it will have to be 7.5.
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