Moving (2023)★ 8.1/10

The best Korean drama of 2023, the last three episodes are so exciting and emotional! A completely subversive, loving group portrait of superheroes, it is truly high-energy, vivid and purposeful throughout, and not a single scene is redundant. Be it the Northern or Southern superhumans, everyone’s just struggling to survive. The characterizations are very life-like, all flesh and blood, and the emotional expression is especially fine. This is a masterpiece that combines idealism, romanticism, and humanism!

Korean dramas are becoming more well-developed, much like the X-Men series, which uses sci-fi to talk about a special community of people. The show is able to unfold a dense drama within a limited time to explain each character, quickly developing the events and revealing the characters' feelings and choices within a certain amount of time. The storyline first shifts from the teenagers to their parents, then the dual narratives intersect, using a political espionage thriller to tell a story of superheroes. However, unlike Marvel, the characters’ core sense of identity in this show stems from history, so it’s kind of a historical tragedy as a whole.

On the surface, it's about people with super-power, but it’s actually about the life of every ordinary person living in typical of East Asian social environments. The most tear-jerking part of the drama is the fact that they have to hide their superpowers by all means to live ordinary lives, and they're already doing their best to survive as normal citizens but are still haunted by others at every turn. The script is thoughtfully written, as if all of the people are brought together in a web woven by fate. The love stories of the parents are truly moving - their relationships are equal, loving, and respectful. It would’ve been nicer if the fight scenes and heavy gore had been cut down a bit.

The special effects are just mediocre, and there are too many plotholes and missing details. I especially hate the narrative, it's too slow - all the characters have to reminisce about their past, but the vividness of supporting characters is not supposed to be depicted that way, and frankly, it’s just a matter of poor screenwriting. The acting is average. With superpowers, the characters still manage to mess up their lives. Speechless. Once again, the story is beyond slow-paced. I was expecting a fantasy blockbuster, but it turns out to be a piece of shit.

With a poster like "The Avengers”, it certainly has a long and tedious story. The first few episodes are simply uninformative, talking about the characters' daily affairs, daydreaming about being heroes and skimpily interspersed with minimal cheap fights. The main story line and the villain's story line are each told separately, and the whole drama is disjointed. The elements and stunts I wish to see merely skim the surface, and the so-called superpowers are displayed in a restrained and weak manner. In order to reduce expenditure, there are not many characters with enough power, and the instant deaths becomes a set routine with no surprises; the bullying part looks very unplanned and is filmed as a mass murder in school, and the essence of father-daughter affection is not captured well. The stories attached to a host of characters tend to be inserted in a patchwork style, and those might probably complete the story in a closed-loop assembly at the end, but now it seems more like fragmented extensions. The story more or less gets more exciting again from episode seven onwards, and the battle for revenge is on verge of breaking out. Hopefully, there will be better handling of plot points and profound meanings in future episodes that will amaze me. If that's so, I’ll be back to change the rating.

People with superpowers have became tools to be exploited; humanitarian sentiments have become weaknesses; people with children are afraid of all dangers and only want to protect their children. In short, kindness and compassion have become the most easily exploited and harmed factors in this society... Although this drama is about superpowers, it is actually about the life of every ordinary person... so sad. It’s truly worthy of a production presented by Disney, as the template for this type of sci-fi show is very well established, but it's also sad because there's less of the local charm and uniqueness of Korean dramas like before…

The 8th and 9th episodes of the drama truly showcased the Korean scriptwriter's exceptional experience in writing romantic love, presenting the love between a handsome man and a beautiful woman in a fairytale-like perfection, and this kind of "sugar-coated bullets" causes viewers to nurture certain kinds of hope and fantasy. The combination of superpowers, politics, power, and romance has made the drama more interesting to watch. I hope that the subsequent plot development will not disappoint me.

The hero and heroine's relationship takes up a large chunk of the plot, but it's as rotten as a 20th century manga filled with fantasies of an otaku. The superpowers part is even more uninspired.

Several of the story lines are so well written. Even with their superpowers, the Korean superheroes are just trying their best to protect their families and live ordinary lives. Both the North and the South Koreans are simply being used by the higher ups, and under the authority of the powerful, only the weak and the weaker are the victims of powerplay. On the other hand, children are both a weakness and a hope.