tvN O'PENing: Babel Syndrome (2022)

It was okay. Nothing More, Nothing Less

First off, I wouldn't say I wasted my time since I watched this mainly because of Lee Siwoo, so I came out like "Yep, I'm satisfied" since I got to see another work from her.

The story is okay, though it didn't really click with me. The initial hook was a very cute romance so I thought it was going to be that way all the way through, but after that, it hits you with a story about a disease that has spread in Korea that will dumb your brain and make every person only speak a limited amount of words which I thought it was going to be like a "The Flu" esc but minus the death which used brilliantly to coincide with the romance, a family drama which was okay to some extent since it made me feel something and a little bit of politics and throughout the end it left me with a wholesome feeling for how it ended.

The world of this movie is set in 2031 and it was shown a little bit as this very futuristic civilization, but since it's not really the main attention of this film, it hardly got highlighted, we just had 1 scene of what the city looks with a flying car passing by and maybe some scenes where some characters are interacting with a hologram screen and this high-tech wristband.

Characters are okay, though not much of them really stuck with me because, since this is an Hour & 7mins film there's not much character depth that they could do, so I hardly got attached to any of the characters, though I would give them props because even with the tight runtime, the pacing didn't become an issue, though it would feel like it's slow because it had a lot of talking.

Acting is good, especially because of how the disease works, so they really have to nail the body language, facial expression, and tonality of what they are saying, which they did, especially the mother of ML. The dynamic of ML and FL is really cute, though how I wish they could've shown us more since I was really invested in the romance aspect of this movie. The brother really annoyed the fuck out of me when he first appeared because he was introduced as this goofy playful brother who's always not there and rarely comes home, but if he does he's just there to goof around and do nothing, but it turns out he was actually doing some political works behind the scenes, sacrificing for the freedom of language and for ML to be able to end up with FL.

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