Rugal (2020)

Tell, why show?

Unfortunately, Rugal is a drama that demands you turn off your brain and just go with the flow. I only finished this one because of the world pandemic (unable to go out) coupled with the convenience of airing on Netflix. Unless you're looking for a mindless action-fest, you'd be better off moving to better things.

PLOT: A Plot Hole Fest Served with Bad Writing
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The drama started with some promise, if not originality, but went downhill fast when it began to rely too much on action, eye candy, and special effects to make up for the writer's lack of experience and painfully simplistic narrative. The story really makes no sense and left no impression. Things happened because "reasons", twists were added because "why not?" and characters acted and reacting according to the "rule of cool" rather than logic.

If you are looking for a well-thought-out, or at the very least decent story, this is certainly not it.

CHARACTERS: Simplistic, Inconsistent and Unrelatable
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Rather than go through each character individually, I'll talk about them in general since none of them really stood out. One of the show's biggest flaw is the writer's inability to create complex characters. Consequently, they all feel borderline cartoony. Think shonen anime where the only focus of the writer is to pile love and adoration onto Gang Gi Bum (ML), who I'm almost certain became Do Hyun's (the writer's) self-insert (aka Gary Sue).

Gang Gi Bum quickly becomes the sole focus of the story, the strongest among all the Rugal members, adored by both allies and enemies... he is a walking plot-line -- or rather, a stumbling one. You can connect every story to him in an egotistical way which not only grew old fast, but allowed no room to develop any other characters.

Perhaps the biggest aggrievance of all was the disservice rendered towards the four female characters who appear on more than one episode of this drama --none of which were unfortunately fleshed out or given agency.

The two female "antagonists", for example, were useless. Argo's chairman's treatment was especially jarring. We were often told by other characters that she was cool, that she shouldn't be underestimated, that "you don't know what she's capable of" only to be shown... absolutely nothing. Again, the writer wanted to claim she's strong/cool/influential without actually giving her agency to show those things. And it's the same thing with Susan, the female scientist of the show. Where we're told by other characters all these things about her personality because she doesn't even have enough air time to develop her...

Of course, the most inconsistent was poor Song Mi Na, the lone female member of Rugal. She went from being the second-best of the team to become the weakest link; complete with a few badass in distress scenes --which were promptly excused by the writer though characters exchanging comments regarding "how strong she is" and how "impressed they were with her". In so doing, the Do Hyun created a laughable cop-out for only showing her distress and having all her badassery apparently happen off-screen...

At the end of the day, the lack of depth the entire cast of characters was riddled with meant I couldn't connect, relate, or even care for any of them. I was never rooting for them to succeed. I was also unconcern whenever they were "in danger". They were wrapped in such a thick layer of plot armor, that it stood to reason they would come out victorious in the end. Heck, even the characters seem keenly aware of their plot armor (especially the ML) because they never displayed an ounce of fear, which marks an author as lacking experience and the confidence of putting his beloved characters through the grinder.

Which leads us to the next point.

WRITING: Amature. Tell, why show?
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I could tell right away the writer didn't have experience because he relied a lot on exposition. Meaning he spoon-fed the audience the story through character dialogues rather than having us reach the conclusion he wanted through scene development.

A good writer will show, rather than tell. If he wants us to feel bad for a character, he'll dedicate time to showing how the character suffers rather than having him say "I'm so sad" in a short conversation. Although the process of showing will be longer, the result will be more powerful.

Simply put, if the audience is not moved to tears when a character cries on the screen... then the emotional buildup wasn't done correctly. In this case, telling us what the characters were feeling through dialogues resulted in a sense of disbelief and disconnect, which made me unable to empathize with any of them.

OVERALL [TL;DR]
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Learn from my painful experience and skip this one if you're looking for a good show. The writing is atrocious, the fights grew old fast, the plot is messy and inconsistent, the characters lack complexity... In fact, the only thing Rugal has going for it was the eye candy, which suffered when they went full emo style with the ML. But even these leather-clad men aren't worth muscling through the diary of a fourteen-year-old who self-inserted into a fantasy where he's the center of the universe; men want to be his sidekicks, women want to bed him, enemies fall in love with him and everything happens based only on the "rule of cool".

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Started pretty brilliant, halfway or so through started falling apart

I LOVE the premise of this. God how I love it! Unfortunately, between a director who has, in the works I've seen, been pretty choppy about putting scenes together and a writer with no drama experience on paper, it has seriously fallen apart in ways that make it only watchable for the action and fx... The dialogue became downright "12 year old fanfiction" level corny and the core emotion, as well as the actors depicting it moment to moment, gets rather lost when, you know, you don't put the scenes together logically.

It had massive potential. Japan could seriously take this and do something magnificent, I think. It is YET ANOTHER instance where anything remotely involving sci-fi elements becomes a handicap simply because it's airing in Korea and in turn made by people who grew up with this odd inability to take notes from over 40 years of badass content worldwide. I just want to sigh.

I'm still giving it a 7 because Park Sung Woong and (weird Japanese 90's hair aside) Choi Jin Hyuk and Jo Dong Hyuk all kill their scenes and Park Sun Ho is awfully cute in this... though made a bit of a wimp overall except for one episode he was allowed to be a bit strategic. The worst offense is Bradley: Jang In Seob's character. SO MUCH POTENTIAL and I really like that there's a backdoor to communicate with these people because of their hyperadvanced chips... in the end, though, they really didn't imagine enough for the guy or the genius Susan (Jang Seo Kyung's character) who supposedly gets a slightly sinister smile turning humans into machines, like they took a psycho genius from a mental ward and made her a police agency doctor...

They give SUCH underdeveloped backstories that behold, here is character-as-prop #1... and 2-32 are over there. It's sad. They should've stuck to the characters and honored the talent they hired.

That said, I don't really regret watching if only because hey... they're kinda smoldering hot a lot of the time, not gonna lie. It took me this long to realize that Jo Dong Hyuk (Tae Woong) is who played the super sexy painter in Love Affairs in the Afternoon. I love that the 4 men-Park Sung Woong, Choi Jin Hyuk, Jo Dong Hyuk, and Park Sun Ho (who I'd seen in Best Chicken as the lead but otherwise only in support roles) are all attractive in totally different ways. Bradley (Jang In Seob) is definitely more support material but he looks pretty handsome in this, too... pity there weren't more females, but that's pretty much every OCN story of this kind and really anything revolving around crime and police/detectives/investigators... Guess that's one reason I have so much affection when they DO put females in high positions. At least let us dream of slightly more equal roles. The character of Jung Hye In, Mi Na, is kind of a wimp, too-flexible, yes, but they didn't have her using her different build the way anyone would, well, anyone trying to avoid horrible injuries. Suppose she's not that 'anyone' in this. Her role in Graceful Family-which was much more female-centric-was far more powerful than this where she was literally programmed to be a damsel detecting distress of the one they -really- wanted most of all to be their star case for this.

Good message, carried out a bit... hmm... poorly. I still enjoyed it. The action is generally really fun. It took til 14 and 15 to get my personal "from episode 2 or 3" goal accomplished, but they did it, just slowly so as to frustrate me. The ending was a bit anticlimactic for me, too. That said, though, I'll also say this: they did well w/Park Sung Woong's character, one really marked moment of the finale-well, 2 for many, just one w/him and the head of Argos for me, that showed what perhaps we needed more of-focused energy... but his character was pretty good, mostly (the director-writer-producers-editors just didn't really let things unravel in the right order), but in turn they were lousy about keeping an air of mystery for other characters we shouldn't see through so very plainly... that alone dropped its score but the writing/direction were the main flaws. The acting made up for a pretty decent bit of it, but there are hundreds of shows I'd recommend before this, probably a good 50 action shows I find superior just from SK-add Japan's movies and you will have tons more. Sci-fi is still a weakly executed genre in SK... but they're working on it.

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