Bullet Point Review: The King In Love
Published in
3 min readJun 19, 2018
- At the core of it, The King In Love, is well, about love, and not just between our trio, but also between a queen and her prince, the prince and his subjects, the ministers and their king and so on. What follows is the story of what love can make people do, what seems just in their eyes, yet can destroy the very relationship they are trying to protect.
- It is hard to expect something radically different from a sageuk. They generally revolve around royal families and the politics and the conspiracies surrounding on who is going to sit on the throne next. So, getting me to sit through one, completely engaged, is a feat won in my opinion. And The King in Love has won…half of that.
- One major problem was having each episode for just half an hour. A sageuk consists of many characters, each representing a side on the central conflict, and at moments of tensions, when both sides are trying to outwit each other, the short running time breaks the tension quite abruptly. By the next episode, it becomes difficult to follow through on what is happening and relish the tension that was just built up in the previous episode.
- Also, the screenplay is a little fuzzy at times. You lose count several times, on who exactly knows what, and when the reveal does come to the right person, you are left thinking, “Wait, I thought she already knew that.”
- The drama has a stronghold over the politics behind the whole conflict, especially with excellent characters like Princess Wonsung (played by an impressive Jang Young Nam), Song In (Oh Min Suk as the despicable minister), Wang Won (Im Siwan, whose character grows on you as the story unfolds), and Wang Rin (an admirable Hong Jong Hyun), but it loses focus as soon as it shifts to the love triangle, and slows down the pace the whole conflict had built up. Yoona is ethereal as Eun San, her character is strong and dynamic, but every time, a problem arises, it ends up circling around her, which just makes it plain boring, especially when there is so much more happening in the background. It is also unfair to Yoona, who has improved so much and is amazing, yet doesn’t get to do much, after a certain point in the story.
- I loved the idea of presenting the information or their reactions (to them), between characters, as whispers through eunuchs, or guards, as opposed to the traditional way of showing the reaction on screen. It is a small yet significant change to show how fast news travels, and who is always on the loop.
- Unlike most sageuks, there is no clear distinction between good and evil. The Queen is an outsider, so she is always wary of everyone in the palace, and her sole objective is to make her son sit on the throne, irrespective of the means she needs to resort to. She is also not against the practice of sending girls as tributes every year to Yuan as part of the treaty. On the same side, her son Won cares for the people and understands their troubles.
Then you have Song In and Wang Jeon, who don’t want a half-blood king sitting on the throne and are against sending tributes to Yuan, but they are despicable and so are their methods. So who are you rooting for?
