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kuronekonerochan · 5 years

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Very messy thoughts about a very messy kdrama: Melting Me Softly

Overall:

I loved the premise...it looked like the kind of ridiculous over the top kdrama that could make for an interesting entertaining watch...unfortunately it is just badly executed. It doesn't know what it wants to be. The action syfy part is confusing, there is no emotional weigh over the tragedy of losing 20 years of life on the part of the Male Lead, although we feel it with the FL(who, by the way, is the only good part of the drama as far as acting goes, despite having little to work with), and even the jokes don't land because the supposed funny side characters are either too annoying and terrible people or they are too pathetic and I pity them instead of finding any of it funny (like the scenes with his family).

Melting me softly is a mess. Honestly with only just how all over the place the pilot was most ppl would have drop it then, but ji chang wook is soooo pretty and it's his comeback after military, still.... lord, is the drama bad.

The syfy element is a mess, the characters are all shallow and unlikable in the few scenes we had with them so far (except the FL who seems nice enough but hasn't had that much to do yet).

The Characters:

JCW is surprisingly unlikable for me and it's not even that he's the cliche jerk. Surprisingly it’s even worse because he’s just boring as a character. He’s not nice, but he doesn’t go out of his way to be cruel so that he can be redeemable later.

Nope, he’s just arrogant and entitled and he interacts with everyone mostly by casting judgmental side eye and being kind of uninterested in anyone else. Not in a charming megalo centric way (like the Lead from What’s Wrong With Secretary Kim, who was a good person despite his ego), but in a dismissive everyday style that makes him all the more unlikable. What’s worse is that it’s even more evident with his family, who are problematic and a bit clingly and “golddigging/leaching” but still they seem to like each other enough in their own weird way. The lead though, treats his family coldly, like a disgusted spectator and it’s hard to watch. There is no chemistry between him and the rest of the cast because the character treats everyone like they’re not worthy of his respect.

That scene where the leads meet and she’s upset over losing 20 years of her life? - I automatically went: *eyeroll Ugh, Men... It's not all about you everytime. You convinced her, effed up her life, own it and stop making excuses! The right thing to do is apologize and shut the f up!

The side characters, as I said are all either pathetic or terrible people, with the exception of the female lead’s family, who seem to be in a different, better acted drama. The shift in tone is jarring.

The Plot:

The plot is a complete mess and the main conflict so far is stupid. His producing team (that ended up convincing his gf) decided to hush things up in the past because outrage, audience ratings, yada yada and that's it! Yet it’s super confusing bc it seems like they are hiding what they did from him and scheming behind his back, while at the same time it's obvious he knows they threw him under the bus back them, so where’s the conflict? Also it's petty and the real villains involved with the cryoproject and the attack on the scientist are still just a vague concept that the drama clearly wont go into anytime soon, so it all seems like filler.

To top it all, last episode's cliffhanger is about their previous romantic interests (who are now in their 40s) reconnecting when one of them is married and the other cover up the ML's disappearance, so it's all just more annoying filler I have no interest in watching...

The production design/ technical aspects:

The technical aspects are also bad, especially the editing...scenes are chopped off and put together and seem cut short or pointless. Time is also weird, they mix office scenes with home scenes from ML and random FL scenes without parallels and it's impossible to make out when the days start and end. It's been a while since I saw such messy execution from the production. Usually it's stuff like plot or characters or acting that bothers me, at most camera work, but here it really is the production as a whole.

What I meant by parallels is that when you are starting to tell a narrative with two leads from their separate povs before they are onscreen together, there's usually an editing order:

Both leads wake up, both leads wander away. Ok so far. Both leads reconnect with family. Scene of FL at home with family followed by scene with ML with family. New day starts. Day 1: looking for answers: contacting the police, talking to the last ppl involved in the experience, etc. Sequencial scenes showing how each go about finding answers in their own way (the method helps to start establishing character and personality differences between the leads). ML does that, but for some reason the FL doesn't? (Maybe here a nightime scene each with the family to further develop feelings/angst and exposition of changes in family dinamics and events that happened while they were gone.) Next is trying to get back the life they left behind. Again, sequencial scenes of his workplace and in this case her university.

And with that we get the feeling a few days have passed and they went around on their parallel journeys. But here it's all jumbled and mashed together. He keeps talking to the people from his network in random chopped talks where it feels like he doesn't ask everything logically just so the drama can have another different scene with them later, he is home, his family is a mess but that isn't even edited in contrast to the scenes of her family for juxtaposition...and he seems to have more scenes than her and hers fall randomly out of nowhere and without logic. After being discharged from the hospital and talking to her family, why wouldn't her first reaction be trying to find him and ask what the hell happened? Instead she goes around, even returns to college before going to him? The drama and the leads seem to walk around in circles without purpose. The transitions are also lowsy...usually all the driving in kdramas is too much but here it is lacking. The ML jumping around from the hospital, to the network, to the (most baffling) secret patient room where the scientist is without us knowing how he got there is distracting. Besides, those small driving scenes are important for character interaction and development: either with phone calls that allow us to see a more intimate side of the characters, how he takes things when nobody is watching, or with another person in the car communicating, or even just silent rides with body language and expression giving us a glimpse of their state of mind.... without any of this, by just appearing in places and doing things, the characters seem shallow and incomplete.

Minor complaints:

They made the choice to make the 2nd Female lead kind of bitchy, greedy and backstabbing by having her agree to the cover up and her decision of not telling him immediately what she had done now and apologize (when her younger self seemed much sweeter than that). I feel like the drama has barely begun and they already did her dirty by choosing to go that way with her character after her introduction on the pilot. Also, typecast of the actress playing her older self... she always plays a bitch (she's very good at it but I wanted to see her on a softer role). I wouldn’t mind if this were a noona romance, since so far the leads have zero chemistry together. To be fair, there wasn’t any with the 2nd female lead, or JCW and any other character in a non romatic way either, in fact, except for the kid niece who actually seems to get a genuine reaction out of him.

Plus we know from K2 that JCW and noonas have better chemistry ;)

At least I wish they had given her a better arc, for example, the girlfriend who was left behind, because of how it went down, never got over her love for him. They could have a romantic interest for her who she met after the lead was frozen, and the two had become very close over the years but she couldn't move on... they could give her closure so she'd finally realize in her heart how she felt about her own romantic interest without it being clouded with guilt and unresolved feelings for the lead.

@kdramaxoxo

#kdrama #kdrama rant #kdrama edit #melting me softly #ji chang wook

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