Hundred Million Stars From the Sky

Hundred Million Stars From the Sky

6/10

Hundred Million Stars From the Sky

Genre:                                                 Episodes: 16                                         Year: 2018

Romance

Mystery

Synopsis:

Detective Yoo Jin Kook is working on a murder case that has been disguised as a suicide. His sister, Yoo Jin Kang, has been growing closer to an enigmatic man, Kim Moo Young, who Jin Kook suspects is the murderer.

Cast:

Seo In Guk (Kim Moo Young)

Jung So Min (Yoo Jin Kang)

Park Sung Woong (Yoo Jin Kook)

Go Min Shi (Im Yoo Ri)

Jang Young Nam (Tak So Jung)

Do Sang Woo (Jang Woo Sang)

Kwon Soo Hyun (Eom Cho Rong)

Seo Eun Soo (Baek Seung Ah)

General Thoughts:

This show really annoyed me. Because it was kinda good and did have a lot of really interesting, fresh concepts, but I just didn’t like the characters enough to actually care what happened to them.

I actually didn't want the main couple to work out

The one thing that makes me lose interest in a drama really quickly is not having any emotional investment in the characters. Because all three of our leads were stubborn and kinda selfish, I ended up not caring about what hardships they went through. I was more on Jin Kook’s team that the main couple, which I’m not sure is what the show was aiming for. While I haven’t seen the original Japanese drama, I did take a bit of a look at how it differed from this remake.

Felt like a cop-out when they didn't end up being related though

Essentially it seems like the plots are pretty much the same with just a few differences sprinkled throughout- some differences bigger than others. The biggest differences seem to be that in the original Japanese version, Moo Young and Jin Kang (Ryo and Yoko) are actually brother and sister. The K-drama version shied away from this incestual twist and made the brother-sider relationship between the leads a lie created by rich girl Se Ran. The other big difference is that originally Yuko kills Ryo (not sure on the reasoning- after a misunderstanding?) and then in horror/regret (because she still loves him) she kills herself. I can see why the Korean version shied away from those twists, as they are fairly dark, and I’m not sure a Korean audience would be as accepting of those turns of events as a Japanese audience may. A smaller difference between the shows is that Ryo just seemed much darker than his Korean counterpart, Moo Young. Originally Moo Young was painted with a rather tainted brush, and he definitely gave off a bad-guy vibe. I still stand by that he’s a massive *sshole.

He wasn't mysterious. He was manipulative and emotionally abusive.

He abetted a young, troubled girl into unknowingly murdering another girl, and then later set up a situation that resulted in the death of another dude, and an innocent girl that he was using for fun. But as the show progressed on, and Jin Kang started falling for Moo Young, these past deeds were just swept under the rug.

In the interests of continuing the love-line, we're just gonna bypass his craziness

It felt kind of like the show had pushed itself into a corner by making its hero into someone dark and fairly unlikable, and then had to somehow convince its audience that it was totally normal and not at all creepy for this girl to fall for him. I mean, I guess they succeeded with a lot of viewers as I’ve mostly heard positive things about the show, but it just didn’t work for me. Moo Young was so dark and then suddenly he was just a normal guy who was misunderstood. I would have loved the show to go deeper into Moo Young’s struggle with his nature- it would have been so interesting to watch him try and figure out how to be a ‘good’ person while constantly battling with the fact that at this point he just wasn’t. Frankly speaking, after Moo Young asked Jin Kang to teach him how to be a good person (which was a great scene I might add), he was suddenly just there without much struggle. All his desire to manipulate and play games with people just seemed to vanish. Which I found super unbelievable. In fact, I found it super unbelievable as a whole that he would try and turn himself around for Jin Kang at all. To me it felt much more like Moo Young was trying to get Jin Kang’s attention and affection purely because she wasn’t giving them to him.

He just isn't used to not being fawned over by females

As someone who was a smooth talker and was so charming, it felt like he’d never really been in the position where a girl just hadn’t been interested in him before. His desire to get close to Jin Kang felt (to me at least) much more like he viewed her as a difficult conquest, and that he wanted to ‘win’ her rather than any actual real affection. And of course the usual trajectory for these kinds of relationships, is that once the person has been ‘won’ the ‘winner’ then pretty much loses interest.

Boy, did I worry about that cat's longevity

While at the end I did buy that Moo Young had genuine and sincere feelings for Jin Kang, I never truly believed his transition. For someone who had never once in his life really cared about anyone else, he sure fell for Jin Kang pretty darn quickly. I also wished that Jin Kook had a better reason for hating Moo Young so much. I mean, yes he was a dark and dangerous dude and I sure as hell wouldn’t want any sister of mine anywhere near him, but Jin Kook seemed to have a deeper hatred against Moo Young that went beyond what we were seeing of him. But then it turned out he didn’t. At the start of the show when Jin Kook was so adamantly against Moo Young, it turns out he didn’t know any more about him than we did. He just hated him way, way, way more. It also bugged me how Jin Kook seemed completely unable to have a rational, reasonable discussion with Jin Kang about why Moo Young wasn’t a great guy to hang around. I’m sure sitting down with her and explaining that he is either a murderer, or someone who orchestrated and cleaned up a murder would probably crush Jin Kang’s enthusiasm for Moo Young far quicker than any nonsensical screaming match ever could. The plot as a whole was just excruciatingly slow, with hardly anything actually happening.

Literally nothing was going on besides Jin Kang deciding whether to date Moo Young or not

There were a lot of mysteries being built and a whole lot of atmosphere being developed, but when it comes down to it, there wasn’t a whole lot going on. Others seemed to get their enjoyment from the building tension and all the character interactions as they slowly circled each other and came closer to the truth, but as I personally didn’t care all that much about any of the lead characters, I kinda didn’t care about the slow circling and atmosphere building- I just wanted the story to hurry up and do something. Despite my lack of interest in the show overall, I did find that the production value of this drama was really good.

Such moody cinematography  

The scenes were all beautiful, and visually very appealing. The angles and lighting in play during this drama really helped to emphasise the dark, mysterious vibe the show was going for, and actually contributed a great deal to making the characters seem creepier than they otherwise would have been. 

What Was Great:

Acting:

Pretty much everyone who acted in this drama was brilliant. Seo In Guk was an obvious standout (when is he not), and it was so brilliant to see him trying out a new type of character. He’s mostly stuck with nice, warm roles in the past, and while he’s definitely had his go at heavy emotional scenes, I think this is his first time playing a villain role (despite being the actual hero of this drama, you can’t deny that Moo Young is still a total villain).

The way he could deaden his eyes was amazing (and slightly unsettling)

He brought a moodiness to Moo Young that really made your hair stand on end, but paired with his trademark cute-guy smile it made it really hard to tell if you wanted to love him or run away from him in terror. Which I believe is the exact effect this character is supposed to have on you- we know he’s bad, but he just seems so good. Seo In Guk was so good at toeing the line of right and wrong, and completely made you question whether his character was actually a bad guy, or just a misunderstood guy that didn’t bother to correct others’ wrong judgement of him. On the other side, we had Seo In Guk/Moo Young’s rival, played by Park Sung Woong. I kind of can’t believe that I hadn’t heard of him until last year, as I feel like I’m seeing him in everything now. Which I do not have a problem with at all. Park Sung Woong delivered another fabulous performance here, and I adored him as the protective, slightly goofy older brother. He was excellent at expressing both Jin Kook’s dorky love for his sister and his aggressive suspicion of Moo Young without ever feeling out of character. Similarly to Seo In Guk, Park Sung Woong could pull out different aspects of his character that made us feel as though we were discovering deeper traits and emotions rather than feeling like we were having random new information thrown at us, which can sometimes be the case.

I must say, I'm glad we phased out the red hairdo

Even the supporting actors such as Go Min Shi, Jang Young Nam, and Kwon Soo Hyun delivered great performances that added to the overall sleek and professional feeling of the show. The one performance I didn’t totally buy was Jung So Min as our leading lady. While she wasn’t bad, I didn’t think she was on the same level as her male costars. Though, this could also be because her character was just lame. 

What Wasn’t:

I Don’t Care About You:

The biggest issue I had with this drama is that I did not give a flying f*ck about any of the characters involved in the story. The problem with not caring about the characters is that this dramatically lowers the stakes and the tension of a show.

Jump, live, be a murderer- at this point I don't really mind ether way

So all this atmosphere that the drama had done such a good job of building was pretty much cancelled out by the fact that it didn’t necessarily matter to me what happened, because I wasn’t emotionally invested in the characters I was seeing on my screen. Would I care if Moo Young and Jin Kang couldn’t be together? Nope. Would I be sad if Jin Kang turned her back on Oppa so she could date Moo Young? Not at all.

I didn't want a happy ending and I didn't get one, so...yay?

Would it bother me if the three main characters all took each other out at the end? No, no, and no. Perhaps this says more about me as a person than this drama as a show, but all the problems that came up for these characters just felt like karma. It was hard for me to feel sympathy for these characters, because every bad thing that happened felt like it was nothing more than the consequences of their own actions. It’s not like they were great people facing life’s unfairness- they did sh*t things and then those sh*t things came back to bite them. I couldn’t feel torn up about Moo Young being thought of as a murderer and a bad guy because he kinda was. If he hadn’t played games with Yoo Ri and her bully friend, Yoo Ri wouldn’t have been able to kill her. If he hadn’t used Seung Ah as a way to antagonise Woo Sang, both Seung Ah and Woo Sang would have lived. So excuse me for not feeling pity for him when his girlfriend’s detective brother wanted her to have nothing to do with him. Cuz you know what- fair call. I couldn’t feel for Jin Kang’s situation of being torn between her brother and her boyfriend because it was her own darn fault.

'I'm gonna ditch my lifelong bestie and the brother who raised me for a dude I've known for 5 minutes' 

For starters, I never like characters that make eyes at their friends lovers, and Jin Kang went out and made eyes right from the start (even if she was pretending she wasn’t). And then after her friend was in a life threatening accident that lead to her being in a comatose state that was so obviously caused by Moo Young, Jin Kang was STILL making eyes. While his girlfriend was dying. Like, it’s just a dog move and there was no way to recover her character in my eyes after that. If she was someone I knew in real life I wouldn’t want to be involved with her, and as a character I just didn’t care what happened to her.

They're all as crazy as each other

When it was revealed that she and Moo Young might be siblings, rather than feeling aggrieved at the bitter twist fate had given them, I almost felt a savage jolt of pleasure- maybe if you’d both been more decent human beings you wouldn’t have ended up in this situation.

In what way did you think this would end well for you?

I was on board with Jin Kook for most of the drama, but he lost me a bit when he stabbed Moo Young. At that point I still believed that he knew some deep dark secret of Moo Young’s (that went beyond that he was a child victim whose parents had been killed). Once it was revealed that Jin Kook didn’t actually have any reasoning behind his intense hatred, it was hard for me to sympathise with him. It just felt like the drama was trying way too hard to make me cry for these characters, when in actuality I didn’t care about them at all. Even having Moo Young and Jin Kang shot and killed at the end didn’t get much of an emotional response from me. While it was an extreme reaction, Moo Young did kill that Chaebol’s two kids- Woo Sang indirectly when he encouraged him into a drunk car chase, and Se Ran very directly when he, ya know, shot her (again, I felt no pity when Moo Young got played by Se Ran because it was exactly what he’d been doing to other people. Karma.). Like, you can’t just kill off all these rich people with all these connections and not expect some retaliation. 

Recommend?

Personally I wouldn’t but I seem to be on the minority for this one.

I feel like I should be sadder that both the leads died...but I'm just not