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This review may contain spoilers
movie-speed pacing
I love dancing-in-your-seat cheering for heroines and heroes.
I love bold cinematography and interesting choices.
I love an actual moral struggle over resentment.
I love a serious intellectual and moral struggle over trying to change the future.
There are so many excellent and positive reviews here on MDL. Read them. But...
My two cents:
Chen Du ling plays a flawed, selfish, obsessed revengeful, filial heroine in her usual no-holds-barred style.
BUT the script has her confront her bloody-minded self in some psychological space on a huge game board every once in a while. It gives the show some real gravitas, because it IS really hard to control the effect your choices will have in the future.
Zhou Yi Ran is so devoted and so patient. He somehow slowly absorbs most of her crazed anger as her lover, her bodyguard and her general. What a man he is in this role.
We cannot keep grinding down each show until they all look the same with our endless criticisms of plot and pace. This has the pace of a good action movie with some gorgeous blotches of color, memory, flashbacks and a good grisly murder or two BY THE HEROINE, up close and personal. It is not like other shows so appreciate that.
It is original. unusual, thought-provoking and sexy in all ways.
ps.
Why did I score it down on acting? The older actors are completely brilliant and the two leads are great. There is something inconsistent about the antagonists. It is probably not skill-sets but just a missing piece in their portrayals.
The script is very good on dialogue, but I think the 'forest of men' concept made a hash of the three antagonists. They each slowly and patiently make a try for the throne, they have wonderful scary lines in long conversations over tea. Very cool. But somebody needed to work with them on differentiating their characterizations more.
The pace was fast, so anything would have helped, some personal favorite item or anything which would consistently introduce them in the central scenes. The color-coding was a good idea but useful mainly in scene-settings.
I love bold cinematography and interesting choices.
I love an actual moral struggle over resentment.
I love a serious intellectual and moral struggle over trying to change the future.
There are so many excellent and positive reviews here on MDL. Read them. But...
My two cents:
Chen Du ling plays a flawed, selfish, obsessed revengeful, filial heroine in her usual no-holds-barred style.
BUT the script has her confront her bloody-minded self in some psychological space on a huge game board every once in a while. It gives the show some real gravitas, because it IS really hard to control the effect your choices will have in the future.
Zhou Yi Ran is so devoted and so patient. He somehow slowly absorbs most of her crazed anger as her lover, her bodyguard and her general. What a man he is in this role.
We cannot keep grinding down each show until they all look the same with our endless criticisms of plot and pace. This has the pace of a good action movie with some gorgeous blotches of color, memory, flashbacks and a good grisly murder or two BY THE HEROINE, up close and personal. It is not like other shows so appreciate that.
It is original. unusual, thought-provoking and sexy in all ways.
ps.
Why did I score it down on acting? The older actors are completely brilliant and the two leads are great. There is something inconsistent about the antagonists. It is probably not skill-sets but just a missing piece in their portrayals.
The script is very good on dialogue, but I think the 'forest of men' concept made a hash of the three antagonists. They each slowly and patiently make a try for the throne, they have wonderful scary lines in long conversations over tea. Very cool. But somebody needed to work with them on differentiating their characterizations more.
The pace was fast, so anything would have helped, some personal favorite item or anything which would consistently introduce them in the central scenes. The color-coding was a good idea but useful mainly in scene-settings.
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