Island (Season 1)
Based on: 2002 South Korean graphic novel of the same name by In-wan Youn and Kyung-il Yang
Written by: Oh Bo-hyun
Directed by: Bae Jong
Starring: Kim Nam-gil (Van), Lee Da-hee (Won Mi-ho), Cha Eun-woo (Priest Johan), Sung Joon (Gungtan)
When this Asian live action fantasy adventure was advertised on my Amazon Prime Video home page, I jumped right at it.
But I might've jumped too far.
I seem to have an issue with watching foreign-language titles with subtitles... I guess I get distracted or have trouble keeping up? This happened also with Pachinko, a Japanese/Korean historical drama which I reviewed close to a year ago. The plot complexities seem to escape me and I'm sure there are plenty of cultural nuances that go completely over my head. But hey, I try, right?
Island was released in two batches of six episodes each (for a total of 12 eps). After the first batch had released, I found that I had basically lost interest, but it was (and still is) hard for me to determine why. Island stars three major characters: Won Mi-ho, a head of a major South Korean company who discovers she possess powerful magic meant to stop evil, Van, a demon who's sworn to protect Won Mi-ho from other demons, and Priest Johan, a powerful exorcist whose mission is to stop all demons. The dynamics of these three became confusing to me and I think a bit of that's due to simple drama. Van wants to protect Won Mi-ho from demons while being a demon himself; Won-Mi-ho sees his intentions and power and trusts him (and probably thinks he's dreamy and hot) despite some occasions when his demon side overtakes him and he becomes dangerous; while Priest Johan just wants to kill Van because he's a demon, and possibly because he's jealous that Won Mi-ho likes Van. Drama.
Amazon's synopsis of the series states that three people are fighting against an evil that's threatening to destroy the world... but that also confuses me because no singular, major evil ever becomes apparent, other than scattered demons. Our three main characters also never become real team-working allies, there's always drama or confusion about who's allied with who and what they're fighting.
I also felt that Won Mi-ho never took things very seriously. That might have been simply part of her character, but it also made the overarching plot a little harder to follow--harder to know what she was supposed to have been fighting against. In the first episode, she makes a corporate blunder that causes embarrassment to her family and she's asked to step away from public eye to the titular island while the scandal dies down. Through the season, she appears far more focused on her company and regaining her reputation than fighting any evil.
The season exceled in many ways. First, I definitely want to mention the visual effects, because they were a treat. Fighting demons involved a lot of superstrength, superspeed, epic jumps, energy blasts, energy shields, and general magic. This was all very exciting and flashy and I thought it always looked crisp, clear, and realistic. There were also plenty of inhuman monsters and distorted human bodies and looked effectively creepy and legit! I was happiest when Van was fighting demon magic with his own demon magic, and especially at the end of the series, when Won Mi-ho was finally learning her own magic more effectively and becoming capable of summoning powerful energy shields.
I also thought the show did a good job of giving backstory and history. I had a hard time following its complexities, but that's not for lack of the show's effort or screentime given. There was at least a full episode devoted to our three main characters' shared childhood, when Van and Johan were determined by priests to be capable of fighting demons and Won Mi-ho rebelled against her observational, background role provide help to them when they were injured. I think there was more to the story, like what happened to this order of priests that discovered the two boys' abilities and why Won Mi-ho apparently lost her memory, but I didn't understand it.
Unfortunately, by the season's finale episodes, I had pretty much checked out. Enough plot complexities had fallen through the cracks for me that I didn't have a good idea exactly what was going on, just what the three of them were fighting for, the stakes of what happened if they lost, or how each of them were personally invested. Considering I had been paying attention for at least 10 of these 12 episodes, I felt that it wasn't entirely my fault and maybe the script writers had left something to be desired. I also noticed that the show hasn't made any American media headlines at all (which good international titles definitely do, like Squid Game and The Silent Sea) and it still hasn't been picked up for a second season, which tells me I might not have been the only viewer that the series lost.
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