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Moving korean drama review
Completed
Moving
1 people found this review helpful
by starlit-dramas
Sep 20, 2023
20 of 20 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 10
Story 9.5
Acting/Cast 10.0
Music 10.0
Rewatch Value 10.0
This review may contain spoilers

This is a love story.

In Moving’s world, there are people with superpowers. People who can perform feats of super-strength, supernatural healing – people with super-senses, people with electrical powers, X-ray vision – among many others. But life isn’t all so rosy as a superhero here – often, it’s seen as something to extort, to hunt – for many in the younger generation of individuals with superpowers, it has been something to conceal away, to protect and keep to oneself.

Meet Kim Bong-Seok, our teenage male lead. He loves bulgogi. He is late to school every single day. He has a recurring dream of flying, where the reality might not be so different. With a personality like pure drops of sunlight, he is weighed down every day – quite literally – by the weights his mother attaches to him wherever he goes.

There is also Jang Hui-Soo – a fellow teenager, a transfer student into the very last year of school. She loves her father more than anything, and she is extremely aware of their poor financial situation. Fortunately, this new school of hers seems to have just the facilities she needs to score high in physical exams – with any luck, she can get on a scholarship, and actively work on clearing her own conscience.

But this is only one part of the whole.

Then there are the adults, viscerally aware of the horrors that lie in wait as their children live out their idyllically sweet, budding school-age romance.

The whole story is told non-linearly, going back and forth throughout time, across multiple different perspectives – at one point breaking entirely away from the teenagers to focus on the adults. This might be a potential hang-up for some, but I personally felt like it really managed to capture a full immersion into the life of each of the characters it explored. It highlighted to me, too – that though the adults experience their own beauty, peace and acceptance in their romantic lives (and as a romance fan myself, I was impressed by each of them; from teenagers to adults, all of the romance in this felt well-rounded, mature and believable) – it also managed to capture another kind of love story, told in different forms, each just as powerfully:

The love story of a parent and their child.

In a drama filled with the things that I love, this theme has to be one of my favourites. Such a full range of complex relationships between parents and their children is explored – the responsibility, sacrifice and protection of some parents, the complete distance, apathy or disinterest of others – the presence and the non-presence of a parent. Even the simplest and purest of bonds between the older and younger generations of this show can become complicated through obligation and guilt. As much as orange is not the same as yellow or red (as the in-drama metaphor goes), there is a sameness and a difference between each child and their parent that I felt like was portrayed with such an incredible nuance, both acting and writing-wise.

Speaking of orange, yellow and red – the direction of this drama; I genuinely feel like the level of thought put into the colours, the framing of shots, as well as the music direction and sound design were all outstanding. Before the drama ended, I found myself rewatching – and having knowledge of the future episodes meant that I was able to pick up on so much of the subtlety I missed the first time around. One scene that immediately comes to mind, is the scene at the end of episode 7, from about the 49:19 mark, with the camera perspective that goes overhead, and the music weaving in and out and aligning so perfectly with the feeling and emotional charge. Multiple characters have their musical "themes" which flow very well – and being largely instrumental (except for the rare external song – like Jannabi's 'TOGETHER!', and 'Alone Again' by Memory Lane, it feels overall different to the way that Korean drama OSTs are, typically.

If I were to nitpick on anything, I personally felt like more time could have been given to the finale to make it feel more fleshed out and rounded. There was quite a lot of implied setup for potential continuation (which I have a feeling will follow on to Kang Full's other comics; Timing and Bridge), but in that, I feel like there were some details left loose that I wouldn’t understand if I were to take this story on its own. But otherwise, there were so many satisfying elements all tied together by the end – and I know I’ll be among those waiting eagerly to know if there will be another series following on.

Make no error about the fact that this is an action story – filled with violence, gore, bloodshed, and killing; but somehow, when I think about this story – that’s not what’s stuck in my head (not like in shows such as 'The Boys' which are similarly superhero-oriented, but rather seem to rely on the gore and shock value as its substance). It’s the power of the characters, and the potency of their love, the bonds they form and the compassion embedded into the very heart of this drama that stay for me. “Moving”, in so many ways, remains true to its name.

I've rated this a 9.5/10 because, even with my nitpicks, they weren't nearly as substantive as the love I felt for this story.
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