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momijizukamori) wrote2023-05-27 06:47 pm
momijizukamori) wrote2023-05-27 06:47 pm
Some (Belated) Notes on Justice in the Dark
Basically all spoiler-free - I very deliberately did not go back and re-read the novel arc before watching it because I knew that would probably just make me more nitpicky.
- Probably my biggest complaint aside from the the genetics thing was that I think LWZ was not well-cast, and then on top of that not well-styled by the costume and makeup team. WAY too much dad energy - the ugly sunglasses, the early 00s spiked bangs, the blah outfits, the stubble - and not enough hot energy. The acting makes it a little less jarring than the BTS/leak photos I saw did, but I still don't love it.
- I have minor quibbles with Tao Ran and Fei Chengyu but I think those are more 'these don't fit the mental image I had of the characters' rather than 'these don't fit the textual description of the characters. All the other main characters seemed very well-cast
- I really hope they got their money's worth out of the Audi product placement, because some of the shots in ep1 are just straight up car ad
- The sound track is great, which karmically makes up for the fact that 'You Raise Me Up' is not a good song.
- Seeing the small details pulled in from the novel - the use of 'You Raise Me Up', the PSP with Patapon - was a nice touch
- huge missed opportunity for an Oldboy-style hallway fight-scene homage shot, but as Andy pointed out, they probably don't have the technical chops for it: "a lot of these hits are not connecting, and they're just jerking the camera around and hoping you don't notice. Still, a US procedural would've had someone just shoot a gun and be done with it"
- They downplayed it somewhat compared to the novel but I'm glad the police corruption bit of the first arc didn't get cut entirely.
- Pei Su's interior design aesthetic is corporate gothic as hell and while I appreciate it on an abstract level it's a little too 'bartending in the dark'/Christian Bale!Batman 'I AM THE NIIIIIGHT'.
- They are def going a little heavier on foreshadowing than the novel on some larger plot elements
- People told me the MTL subs were okay. These people are either dirty liars or have standards that are subterranean. The only metric by which they are 'okay' is compared to other MTL, which is to say they devolve into nonsense every five sentences instead of every two. I am an experienced sub-watcher, c-drama watcher, and have read the source novel, and was still BARELY able to follow along. Thankfully there are updated subs on Youku now but a lot of the pirate streaming sites have the old ones (if the intro text in ep1 is unsubtitled, and they talk about 'zero-degree empathy' rather than 'apaths' you've got the MTL subs)
Okay, the big elephant in the room: the changes. We are now set in some nebulous sci-fi future society, which is presumably how they got away with including any of the institutional corruption at all. Aside from the intro, the only time the fact that this is the ~future~ has come up so far is when LWZ calls the PSP a vintage game system. There's also the renames which are just ???. They even renamed Luo Yiguo? Bizarre.
The real bear of a change is the 'zero empathy' gene - a detectable gene that makes people criminals. First of all, this is a Big Yikes concept in general, and goes farther than other fiction that has this as a central dissected idea instead of just shoehorned in (Gattaca, Minority Report, Psycho-pass).
Second, it removes a lot of what made Mo Du a truly top-tier crime novel instead of a more mindless thriller - the examination of the ways societal institutions ignore and enable cycles of abuse, particularly by people with power. By making it a medical/scientific problem we have neatly absolved all those institutions and powerful people.
Overall verdict: a solid procedural, even though it doesn't really surpass that to become something greater the way the novel did.
- Probably my biggest complaint aside from the the genetics thing was that I think LWZ was not well-cast, and then on top of that not well-styled by the costume and makeup team. WAY too much dad energy - the ugly sunglasses, the early 00s spiked bangs, the blah outfits, the stubble - and not enough hot energy. The acting makes it a little less jarring than the BTS/leak photos I saw did, but I still don't love it.
- I have minor quibbles with Tao Ran and Fei Chengyu but I think those are more 'these don't fit the mental image I had of the characters' rather than 'these don't fit the textual description of the characters. All the other main characters seemed very well-cast
- I really hope they got their money's worth out of the Audi product placement, because some of the shots in ep1 are just straight up car ad
- The sound track is great, which karmically makes up for the fact that 'You Raise Me Up' is not a good song.
- Seeing the small details pulled in from the novel - the use of 'You Raise Me Up', the PSP with Patapon - was a nice touch
- huge missed opportunity for an Oldboy-style hallway fight-scene homage shot, but as Andy pointed out, they probably don't have the technical chops for it: "a lot of these hits are not connecting, and they're just jerking the camera around and hoping you don't notice. Still, a US procedural would've had someone just shoot a gun and be done with it"
- They downplayed it somewhat compared to the novel but I'm glad the police corruption bit of the first arc didn't get cut entirely.
- Pei Su's interior design aesthetic is corporate gothic as hell and while I appreciate it on an abstract level it's a little too 'bartending in the dark'/Christian Bale!Batman 'I AM THE NIIIIIGHT'.
- They are def going a little heavier on foreshadowing than the novel on some larger plot elements
- People told me the MTL subs were okay. These people are either dirty liars or have standards that are subterranean. The only metric by which they are 'okay' is compared to other MTL, which is to say they devolve into nonsense every five sentences instead of every two. I am an experienced sub-watcher, c-drama watcher, and have read the source novel, and was still BARELY able to follow along. Thankfully there are updated subs on Youku now but a lot of the pirate streaming sites have the old ones (if the intro text in ep1 is unsubtitled, and they talk about 'zero-degree empathy' rather than 'apaths' you've got the MTL subs)
Okay, the big elephant in the room: the changes. We are now set in some nebulous sci-fi future society, which is presumably how they got away with including any of the institutional corruption at all. Aside from the intro, the only time the fact that this is the ~future~ has come up so far is when LWZ calls the PSP a vintage game system. There's also the renames which are just ???. They even renamed Luo Yiguo? Bizarre.
The real bear of a change is the 'zero empathy' gene - a detectable gene that makes people criminals. First of all, this is a Big Yikes concept in general, and goes farther than other fiction that has this as a central dissected idea instead of just shoehorned in (Gattaca, Minority Report, Psycho-pass).
Second, it removes a lot of what made Mo Du a truly top-tier crime novel instead of a more mindless thriller - the examination of the ways societal institutions ignore and enable cycles of abuse, particularly by people with power. By making it a medical/scientific problem we have neatly absolved all those institutions and powerful people.
Overall verdict: a solid procedural, even though it doesn't really surpass that to become something greater the way the novel did.