Golden Empire is such a unique and fascinating experience. It put me in some sort of trance and absorbed my mind for days, even thought it was, in fact, just a long, heavy and quite pompous stage play.

I bet the huge portion of the viewers will find this show tedious, pretentious and hard to get through. The whole plot structure is based on conversations, mostly business oriented, full of figurative speech and literature and/or philosphical references. It might be heavy and overwhelming to some, but personally I find the overall tone of this show really mesmerizing and the whole experience very enriching. It satisfied my aesthetic needs, challenged and provoked my intellect and provided a really good piece of entertainment.

This show engages you mind to the fullest, but leaves you heart cold, as the writing doesn't try to emotionally connect you with the characters. At all. It's hard to sympathize with those emotioneless stoic figures. Desire for power, figuratevily presented as Sungjin Group, is their only agenda and greed is their only driving force in live. The characters are ruthless, cynical, treacherous and self-serving. Interactions between them is a neverending fest of backstabbing, lying and strategic plans to bring (mis)fortune to each other. They act more like some sort of abstract ideas/archetypes, rather than real people, but it fits the narrative exceptionally well. I see this story as nothing more than a modern day tragedy (in a literary sense) examinating how far human greed can go. The characters are just a vessels for this narrative.

Humans consumed by their desires, never able to achieve their goal. Greed is a source of hunger that will never be satisfied. Being in a position of power will only bring misery and loneliness. Power corrupts the mind and revenge is always lonely and pititful. It's a neverending cycle of self-perpetuating destruction and the titular Golden Empire is just hollow.

It doesn't mean the characters are one-dimensional evil fools. They're nuanced and twisted and gradually developed m. Driven by their own sense of jusitice, twisted revenges and grand desires. It's hard to root for just one person because they're all equally unlikeable... and interesting. From ambitious Tae Joo, through vengeful Min Jae, to ruthless Seo Yoon (honestly, one of the best female characters I've seen). Our biases will change as frequently as alliances in this drama and at one point they might eventually stop. I'd say it helps us stay grounded and not get fooled by the players of this game.

Acting and the visual aspect of the set also resembles the aesthetic of theatre play. It's a low budget drama, so we usually see the same 4 locations over and over again. Some of them have a deeper, symbolic meaning (like the dinner table or the main office in the Sungjin Group HQ), but usually it's just result of budget cut. It creates a specific, kinda claustrophobic, atmosphere straight from the theatre stage.
It took me some time to get used to the acting that was quite robotic for most of time. It looks really old-school which has it's charm, I guess. Unfortunately, sometimes it's really underwhelming because weaker performance minimize the actual development of the character. That's the case of Lee Yo Won. Her face was blank most of the time and it looked like she took the "stone cold characterization" just too literally. Other actors were more generous with their delivery of micro-expressions even when they played simillar characters. It's just something you either love or hate here. I was indifferent most of the times.

Overall, Golden Empire is a fantastic show. Sophisticated, engrossing and mentally stimulating. It perfectly blends the line between being overly dramatic and completely serious, which suits my taste.

And I swear, if they don't play the main theme at my funeral, then I'm not dying.